Introduction of Nucleic Acid

Assalamualaikum and hi everyone. As you can see from the title, our blog will mainly discuss nucleic acid as a part of our assignment. So, before that, we must know the history of nucleic acid. How they were found? Who was responsible for finding nucleic acid? First of all, what is nucleic acid? Nucleic acid is a part of biomolecules that comprises in our body. Nucleic acid are essential in all living organism either plants or animals.

Sir Johannes Friedrich Miescher

Nucleic acid were first found as nuclein by Sir Johannes Friedrich Miescher. He has isolated various phosphate-rich chemicals from the nuclei of white blood cells in 1869. His finding helps to determine hereditary was carried by the structure of DNA. Then, in 1889, Sir Richard Altmann had introduced the "nucleic acid" term to replaced nuclein as he found that it has acidic properties. After that, Rosalind Franklin had use X-ray crystallography to study the structure of DNA during 1950 until 1953 throughout her time at King's College. Based on her experiment, she suggested that the structure of DNA is a helical shape.

 

    Rosalind Franklin and her famous image, Photo 51 captured during her experiment that leads into a conclusion regarding DNA structure.

Finally, James Watson and Francis Crick had developed a complete model of DNA structure in 1953 with the help from Rosalind Franklin and Maurice Walkins experiment regarding of X-ray crystallography of DNA structure. Their DNA model had been used widely since then.

Watson and Crick double helix DNA model structure

This amazing scientific breakthrough in genetics and life science helps scientists to better understand how inheritance among organism occur. Stay tuned for more information about nucleic acids as there are many more facts that we can learn about nucleic acid. See all of you in another time. Bye