International Year of Chemistry 2011: The Importance of Sequences

[摘要] For a long time, discovery in chemistry primarily meant identifying new elements and compounds, or defining new metabolic pathways. In the second half of the 20th century, however, the most exciting discoveries came from the discovery of the structures of biopolymers: proteins and nucleic acids. In 1958, the Nobel Prize in chemistry was awarded to a British scientist, Frederick Sanger, for the discovery of the amino acid sequence of the insulin molecule (1). In 1962, the Nobel Prize was awarded to Francis Crick, James Watson, and Maurice Wilkins (Rosalind Franklin died in 1958) “for their discoveries concerning the molecular structure of nucleic acids and its significance for information transfer in living material” (2). In 1980, it was given to Paul Berg, Walter Gilbert, and (again) Sanger. Berg produced the first recombinant DNA molecule, and Gilbert and Sanger independently developed methods for determining base sequences in DNA (3).Thus, the name of Frederick Sanger is associated with elucidation of the sequences of both proteins and nucleic acids. He …

[学科分类] 过敏症与临床免疫学