1956/08/01 by H. Yockey, Hubert P. Yockey
Biochemistry, Genetics and Molecular Biology · #DNA and Nucleic Acid Chemistry #RNA and protein synthesis mechanisms #DNA and Biological Computing
paper · doi:10.2307/3570363
Two recent advances in widely separated subjects, communication and molecular structure, will enable us to deal with the vastly detailed genetic specificity found in the organism. The idea has been accepted for many years in genetics that the chromosomes in the nucleus of the cells carry numerous determining factors or markers called genes which play their assigned roles in the life of the cell. is, in fact, the very business of genetics to study this matter. is also clear that the number of these determining factors must be enormous. Recently, evidence has accumulated which indicates that the deoxyribonucleic acid in the chromosome contains most, if not all, the genetic specificity (1). A structure for deoxyribonucleic acid has been proposed by Watson and Crick (2) which accounts for the replication process and for the storage of the genetic specificity. Their idea is that the molecule is a double helix of deoxynucleotide chains. Each deoxynucleotide residue has one of four possible bases which are cytosine, thymine, guanine, and adenine. Adenine can pair only with thymine, and guanine only with cytosine, so that one half of the helix is determined by the other half. They were quick to point out that: It follows that in a long molecule many different permutations are possible, and it, therefore, seems likely that the precise sequence of the bases is the code which carries the genetical information. is of fundamental importance to understand how protein specificity and synthesis comes about. Since proteins are formed from some twenty or possibly more amino acids, the problem is not a simple matter of one-to-one correspondence. Gamow (3) has presented a theory of protein synthesis based on this model of DNA. His basic idea-that the problem is one of recoding the genetical information from a four-letter alphabet to a twenty-letter one-is ingenious. Schwartz (4) points out some essential difficulties and presents a theory of his own. The question of protein synthesis is very much an open one. For the present paper, we need only the idea that protein specificity results somehow from a message recorded in DNA. is not necessary to know the role of ribonucleic acid. Changes in the order of the bases in the DNA molecule will be thought of as being reflected in protein spec