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[ ] [ ] [ ] [ English Version ] | | | | | | | | | Chapter 1 Chapter 2 Chapter 3 Chapter 4 Chapter 5 Chapter 6 Chapter 7 Chapter 8 Chapter 9 Chapter10 Chapter11 Chapter12 Chapter13 Chapter14 Chapter15 Chapter16 Chapter17 Chapter18 Chapter19 >> >> >> Chapter 2 1. In Griffith's experiments with virulence in bacteria, how did he demonstrate that the transformation from nonvirulence to virulence was truly a hereditary change? In the absence of such a demonstration, what other explanations could have accounted for his results? 2. How did the experimental approaches of Avery, MacLeod, and McCarty vs. those of Hershey and Chase differ in demonstrating the nature of genetic material? 3. Prion diseases are a group of neurodegenerative diseases that appear to be entirely transmitted by proteins, with no essential role for nucleic acids. Keeping in mind the experiments of Avery et al., how do you think the absence of a role for nucleic acids in prion infectivity was experimentally established? 4. Describe Chargaff's experiments addressing the nucleotide composition of DNA. What did his results say about the structure of DNA and about how DNA stores information? 5. How did X-ray diffraction studies contribute to the discovery of the structure of DNA? What specific insights were provided by these studies? 6. Explain how the design of the Meselson and Stahl experiments addressed the question of DNA replication. 7. Draw the reaction catalyzed by DNA polymerase. What determines the sequence of the DNA produced by the reaction? Describe the experiments that were carried out to demonstrate this. 8. On what basis did researchers reason that DNA was most likely not the template for protein synthesis? What evidence led to the conclusion that the real template was RNA? 9. Describe three major differences between the structures of deoxyribonucleic acids and ribonucleic acids. 10. What is the "central dogma" concerning the flow of genetic information? Is it always valid? 11. What reasoning led Francis Crick to propose that an adaptor molecule intervenes between messenger RNA and amino acids? What did the adaptor turn out to be? 12. (a) You would like to isolate rRNA, tRNA, and mRNA from a particular cell type. What properties can you rely on to distinguish between these three types of RNA---for example, in terms of their size, complexity, GC content, or abundance in the cell? (b) rRNA and mRNA both interact with ribosomes, but in fundamentally different ways. Describe the differences in the way each of these two types of RNA interacts with ribosomes. 13. What is the advantage of having each amino acid specified by a sequence of three nucleotides? Why would two have been too few? Can you think of any reasons why four would be disadvantageous? 14. In determining how many bases are required to specify an amino acid (that is how many bases constitute a codon), Francis Crick, Sydney Brenner, and colleagues used a class of mutagens that cause insertions and deletions of single base pairs in DNA. In gene X, predict the phenotype of mutants having, respectively, one through six insertion mutations, and explain how these results might be used to determine the coding properties of DNA. A B C
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15. Once it had been established that codons consist of sets of three nucleotides, what approach did Nirenberg and Matthaei use to begin cracking the code? What was the first codon that they deciphered?

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