Chapter 9: DNA and It's Role in Heredity Flashcards
Who was Frederick Griffith?
a physician trying to find a vaccine for pneumonia
What did Frederick Griffith do?
He would heat kill bacterial and inject them into mice to see if the mice would become immune to the pneumonia-causing bacteria
What did Griffith find and how?
Found two strains of bacteria but culturing samples from mucus; characterized them as smooth and rough
What strain of pneumonia was dangerous? Why?
Smooth (S) was dangerous, rough (R) was not; S strain bacteria had a polysaccharide capsule (which hinders the ability of the immune system to detect them) around their cells and R did not
T/F Chemicals from dead R strains transformed live R cells into virulent S cells
F Chemicals from dead S strains transformed live R cells into virulent S cells
What did Avery et al. try to identify?
The transforming principle of pneumonia
How did Avery et. al perform their experiments?
Treated S bacteria samples to selectively destroy different types of macromolecules
What were Avery et. al hypothesis
If macromolecule X is the transforming material, when it is destroyed, the transforming activity will be lost
What did Avery et. al find? What was their conclusion?
R strain was still transformed when S-RNA or S-protein was destroyed, but was not transformed if the S-DNA was destroyed
What was Avery et. al conclusion?
Because only DNase destroyed the transforming substance, the transforming substance is DNA
In ______, Alfred Hershey and Martha Chase used ________, viruses which attack bacteria, to explore their ideas; What were they trying to determine?
1952
Bacteriophage
Determine whether DNA, or protein, is the genetic material
How did Hershey and Chase conduct their experiment
they grew cultures of virally infected bacteria with either radioactive phosphate or sulfur. DNA should have the radioactive P and protein would have the radioactive S, so you can see which radiation is transferred to the bacteria
what did Hershey and Chase conclude
DNA contained the information needed to make the next generation of phage; the proteins were just there as a package
What is Chargaff’s Rule?
DNA molecule has the same amounts of purines and pyrimidines present
What are purines, what are pyrimidines?
Purines (Adenine and Guanine)
Pyrimidines (Thymine and Cytosine)
X-ray crystallography showed DNA was a ________
right-handed helix of uniform diameter
What can be inferred from the diffraction pattern of X rays passing through the substance?
positions of atoms
Who prepared crystallographs of DNA in the early 1950s and what did they discover?
Rosalind Franklin
Suggested that DNA is a spiral or helical molecules and that nitrogenous bases are interior
What did Francis Crick and James Watson do?
They combined all the knowledge of DNA to determine its structure and built a model
Antiparallel strands
The polarity of strand is determined by the sugar-phosphate bonds
What do phosphate groups in DNA connect to?
The 3C of one sugar and the 5C of the next sugar
What group is on the 5 end of DNA? What group is on the 3 end?
Phosphate on 5
Hydroxyl on 3
In what order is the DNA sequence written for a single strand?
5 to 3
What defines the chemical polarity of a strand?
Deoxyribose sugar
What causes major and minor grooves?
Because of base pairing, the sugar-phosphate backbones are closer together on one side of the double helix
Which groove has atoms more available for hydrogen bonding and protein interaction?
major grooves
What is the key to protein-DNA interactions
Binding of proteins to specific base-pair sequences
Why do proteins bind to DNA
to alter its structure, regulate its transcription or replication
What are the four key structures of DNA structure
Double-stranded helix of uniform diameter
Right-handed
Strands are in antiparallel orientation based of 5’ and 3’ carbons
Outer edges of nitrogenous bases are exposed in the major and minor grooves
What are the four important functions of DNA
genetic material…
stores genetic information
is suceptible to mutation through a simple alteration in the sequence
is precisely replicated in cell division by complementary base pairing
expressed as the phenotype
Nucleotide sequence dtermines …
the sequence of amino acids in protiens
Joined sister chromatids are ___________ that are produced by semi-conservative DNA replication
two DNA molecules
Where is there circumstantial evidence for DNA
that is present in the nucleus and chromosomes, doubles during the s phase, and there is twice as much in diploid cells as in haploid
DNA amounts…
prior to S phase
following S phase
after Mitosis
1 pair of homologous chromosomes
1 pair of replicated homologous chromosomes
2 identical daughter cells
Where are new nucleotides added to a DNA strand
At the 3 end
What determines the nucleotide sequence
complementary base pairing with the template strand
What direction is the template strand read by DNA polymerase
3 -> 5 direction
What does DNA polymerase create?
A phosphodiester bond between internal phosphate at 5 carbon and hydroxyl at 3 carbon
What are semiconservative, conservative, and dispersive replication? Which is the way DNA actually replicates
semiconservative: each parental strand is a template for a new strand (this is the way it replicates)
conservative: the two parental strands remain together in one daughter molecule while serving as a template for another daughter molecule
dispersive: parent molecule is dispersed among both strands in the two daughter molecules
What did the Meselson-Stahl Experiment do?
Grow Ecoli with N15, a heavy isotope that makes DNA denser, then transferred to a medium with N14; discovered that resulting densities could only be explained by the semi-conservative model
What were the results of the Meselson-Stahl Experiment?
After one round of replication, DNA had intermediate weight
After subsequent rounds, light-weight DNA and intermediate-weight DNA were present
Why did the data from Meselson-Stahl Experiment provide that DNA replication isn’t conservative or dispersive
if conservative, the first generation would have been both high and low density with no intermediate
if dispersive, all the the density of the first gen would have been intermediate, but all future generations would shift closer to being only light
What are the 6 ingredients for PCR
DNA template, primers, dNTPs, DNA polymerase, salts and a buffer
What are the three steps to DNA replication
Initiation, Elongation, Termination
What happens during the initiation step DNA replication?
unwinding (denaturing) the DNA double helix and synthesizing RNA primers