Genetics : genetic information and the control of protein structure and function transactions of the first conference October 19, 20, 21, and 22, 1959, Princeton, N.J / edited by H. Eldon Sutton.

  • Macy Conference on Genetics 1959 : Princeton, N.J.)
Date:
[1960]
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Licence: Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0)

Credit: Genetics : genetic information and the control of protein structure and function transactions of the first conference October 19, 20, 21, and 22, 1959, Princeton, N.J / edited by H. Eldon Sutton. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    Fine Structure of Chromosomes, and Coding 57 Watson: If there were an alternation, you might expect to pick up both of them. Spiegelman: Then, you would get pairing of bases on the average. Dai is: You could get synchronization rather than pairing. Watson: We might invent a scheme in which there is preferential combination of one of the complementary DNA chains with virus protein. Spiegelman: And it is always the same one. Watson: Yes. What would remain unclear is what to do with the other chain. Mutants of the virus have now been obtained, so it should be possible to develop some genetics. For a long while, people failed to get genetic recombination, but now the Tessmans (40) have observed some in Sl3. Spiegelman: Are they being bothered by a lot of dead phage in cross¬ ing experiments.^ Levinthal: They get a certain amount of recombination. Whether the absolute value of this recombination frequency is artificially low because of that, I don't know. Steinberg: Is there a large proportion of dead phage in each transfer ? Watson: Yes, more so than with T2. Many particles seem to contain an incomplete amount of nucleic acid, more than half the original. In the centrifuge, there are several peaks, of which only the forward- moving peak has high infectivity. Steinberg: T. C. Sonneborn* has mentioned the large proportion of dead phage and said that it seemed to him that possibly only a very small proportion of the viruses had double helices and were capable of reproduction. The large proportion of single-strand phage might be the part which could not reproduce. Lederberg: The original evidence for this being single-strand was the P^- decay kinetics. One of the perplexities that hasn't been con¬ sidered is the conservation of DNA molecules and of phage DNA aggregates during mitotic replication, on the one hand, and the apparent nonconservation of the entire aggregates in a typical four-strand system of meiosis. One would wonder, however, if there is any conservation at all of the input parental DNA in a meiotic system. SUMMARY Lederberg: The previous discussion was a rather comprehensive review of the structure of DNA, and it is obvious we are getting far enough into this to begin to have many very tangible questions, of the *PersonaI communication.