Genetic Significance of the Transfer of Nucleic Acid from Parental to Offspring Phage1

  1. A. D. Hershey and
  2. Elizabeth Burgi
  1. Department of Genetics, Carnegie Institution of Washington, Cold Spring Harbor, New York

This extract was created in the absence of an abstract.

Excerpt

Putnam and Kozloff (1950) first demonstrated that labeled atoms derived from a parental generation of phage particles were partly conserved among the viral offspring. Subsequent work showed that the conserved atoms were derived from and transferred to deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA), chiefly or exclusively (Hershey and Chase, 1952; Kozloff, 1953; French, 1954). What can this phenomenon tell us about genetic replication and recombination?

The selective transfer of DNA is not itself very informative: most of the viral protein fails to enter the cell at the time of infection and is unavailable for transfer (Hershey and Chase, 1952). Moreover, the same selectivity is observed when one examines the utilization of labeled bacterial constituents for viral growth: only the DNA is utilized efficiently (Kozloff et al., 1951; Hershey et al., 1954). Considering the two results together one can invoke metabolic accident, or perhaps nuclear localization of viral growth, but certainly not direct expression...

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    1 Supported in part by a grant (C 2158) from the National Cancer Institute, National Institutes of Health, Public Health Service. Isotopes were supplied by the Oak Ridge National Laboratory on allocation from the Atomic Energy Commission.

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