Marshall Warren Nirenberg
Marshall
Warren Nirenberg was one of the famously known scientists in the
1960s.He was born in New York City on April 10, 1927 and died on January
15, 2010. Marshall Nirenberg married twice right after his first
wife,Perola Zaltzman-Nirenberg, died in 2001 and married Myrna M.
Weissman in 2005.He studied in the field of biochemistry and genetics at
University of Florida and the University of Michigan. He with scientist
Har Gobind Khorana and scientist
Robert W. Holley were awarded for figuring out the genetic code and
knowing how it works in the protein synthesis. Marshall Nirenberg was awarded 6 times in
1960s by the way.In 1961 Marshall Nirenberg, a young biochemist at the National Institute of Arthritic and Metabolic Diseases, discovered the first "triplet"—a sequence of three bases of DNA that codes for one of the twenty amino acids that serve as the building blocks of proteins. Within 5 years he helped decipher the genetic code .On this article, The Current Status of RNA Code,
Marshall Warren Nirenberg and Oliver W. Jones(another scientist)talked
about how bases of polynucleotides in RNA are found and work in
proteins. Hypothesis:
Nirenberg and his group deciphered the entire genetic code by matching amino acids to synthetic triplet polynucleotides. They found that there is redundancy in that some amino acids are encoded by more than one codon and some codons are "punctuation marks" in the mRNA message. He also found out that there were a lot of uracil in a triple code even though in natural template RNA such as viral RNA didn't have as much as it has right now. So him and his partner Roberts(another scientist) made an alternative hypothesis that degenerates the code from non-U(uracil) and uracil containing code words. This hypothesis wanted just to double code the uracil to know the proportions of polynucleotides would be within the range of viral RNA. Here's the data of the following counted codes:
Results:
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