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Rosalind Elsie Franklin (25 July 1920 – 16 April 1958) [1] was a British chemist and X-ray crystallographer.Her work was central to the understanding of the molecular structures of DNA (deoxyribonucleic acid), RNA (ribonucleic acid), viruses, coal, and graphite. [2]
It was the first virus to be discovered, and the first to be crystallised and its structure shown in detail. The first X-ray diffraction pictures of the crystallised virus were obtained by Bernal and Fankuchen in 1941. On the basis of her pictures, Rosalind Franklin discovered the full structure of the virus in 1955. [35]
Rosalind Franklin proposed the full structure of the tobacco mosaic virus in 1955. One main motivation for the study of viruses is because they cause many infectious diseases of plants and animals. [1] The study of the manner in which viruses cause disease is viral pathogenesis. The degree to which a virus causes disease is its virulence. [2]
The crystallographer Rosalind Franklin worked for Stanley for about a month at Berkeley, and later designed and built a model of TMV for the 1958 World's Fair at Brussels. In 1958, she speculated that the virus was hollow, not solid, and hypothesized that the RNA of TMV is single-stranded. [ 14 ]
Rosalind Franklin developed X-ray crystallographic pictures and determined the full structure of TMV in 1955. [9] Franklin confirmed that viral proteins formed a spiral hollow tube, wrapped by RNA, and also showed that viral RNA was a single strand, not a double helix like DNA. [10]
The structure of the virus was first elucidated in 1958 using X-ray diffraction by a team at Birkbeck College led by Rosalind Franklin, [77] [78] showing the polio virus to have icosahedral symmetry. [ 79 ]
In 1956 he and Franklin published individual but complementary papers in the March 10 issue of Nature, together showing that TMV was a hollow rod, rather than a solid structure as generally believed. They also demonstrated that RNA in TMV was wound along the inner surface of the hollow virus.
In 1952, Alfred Hershey and Martha Chase confirmed that the genetic material of the bacteriophage, the virus which infects bacteria, is made up of DNA [4] (see Hershey–Chase experiment). In 1953, James Watson and Francis Crick discovered the double helical structure of the DNA molecule based on the discoveries made by Rosalind Franklin. [5]