Wikinventia — Atlas of discoveries and inventions · Global Age

The genetic sequence hypothesis — Francis Crick

1958 AD · Transmission: Global
BiologyTheoryBritish

Crick develops from the mid-1950s onward the sequence hypothesis: the order of bases in DNA encodes the order of amino acids in a protein. He formulates it in his paper "On Protein Synthesis" (1958), directly inspired by Sanger's demonstration that insulin has a fixed, determined amino acid sequence, not an amorphous structure as had been assumed until then. It lays the conceptual foundations of what would later be formalized as the central dogma of molecular biology.

InstitutionCavendish Laboratory / MRC Unit, University of Cambridge
Historical regionCambridge, United Kingdom
Primary sourceCrick, F.H.C. — "On Protein Synthesis", Symposia of the Society for Experimental Biology 12 (1958): 138-163
Secondary sourceCobb, M. — "60 years ago, Francis Crick changed the logic of biology", PLOS Biology (2017)
Original languageEnglish
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