Interviewee: Sydney Brenner.
In this first of a two-part clip, Sydney Brenner describes the information transfer problem from DNA to the protein-making machinery.
(DNAi Location: Code > Copying the code > Players > Sydney Brenner > On the beach - Part I)
Transcript:
So you can imagine what you have is you have the DNA, there are the two strands of DNA, and then somewhere here we had this ribosome which we'll draw as a box. What we knew is that the information was coded in the sequence of bases here and what came out of the box was a protein, which is another amino acid sequence. And then of course the protein then folded up into this elaborate three-dimensional structure. But the question is, how did the information get out of there, into the ribosome and then be translated into protein. Well the idea was, you'd copy a strand of this DNA, so we then get a strand, a single strand of RNA, that carries the message of the DNA, and that's why it's called messenger RNA, and it was taken into the ribosome here. And then here it was translated into the amino acid.
In this section learn that in the cytoplasm, the messenger RNA is released from its carrier proteins and binds to a protein assembly complex called a ribosome.
Matt Meselson also had a hand in Sydney Brenner's RNA experiment. He talks about the experiment and how they waited for James Watson's group to finished their RNA work before publishing.
François Jacob, Sydney Brenner and Matt Meselson worked on the role of mRNA. An on/off switch involving mRNA seemed a logical control point for protein production.