Gene - History

History

The notion of a gene is evolving with the science of genetics, which began when Gregor Mendel noticed that biological variations are inherited from parent organisms as specific, discrete traits. The biological entity responsible for defining traits was later termed a gene, but the biological basis for inheritance remained unknown until DNA was identified as the genetic material in the 1940s. Prior to Mendel's work, the dominant theory of heredity was one of blending inheritance, which proposes that the traits of the parents blend or mix in a smooth, continuous gradient in the offspring. Although Mendel's work was largely unrecognized after its first publication in 1866, it was rediscovered in 1900 by three European scientists, Hugo de Vries, Carl Correns, and Erich von Tschermak, who had reached similar conclusions from their own research. However, these scientists were not yet aware of the identity of the 'discrete units' on which genetic material resides.

The existence of genes was first suggested by Gregor Mendel (1822–1884), who, in the 1860s, studied inheritance in peaplants (Pisum sativum) and hypothesized a factor that conveys traits from parent to offspring. He spent over 10 years of his life on one experiment. Although he did not use the term gene, he explained his results in terms of inherited characteristics. Mendel was also the first to hypothesize independent assortment, the distinction between dominant and recessive traits, the distinction between a heterozygote and homozygote, and the difference between what would later be described as genotype (the genetic material of an organism) and phenotype (the visible traits of that organism).

Charles Darwin used the term Gemmule to describe a microscopic unit of inheritance, and what would later become known as Chromosomes had been observed separating out during cell division by Wilhelm Hofmeister as early as 1848. The idea that chromosomes are the carriers of inheritance was expressed in 1883 by Wilhelm Roux. Darwin also coined the word pangenesis by (1868). The word pangenesis is made from the Greek words pan (a prefix meaning "whole", "encompassing") and genesis ("birth") or genos ("origin").

Mendel's concept was given a name by Hugo de Vries in 1889, in his book Intracellular Pangenesis; although probably unaware of Mendel's work at the time, he coined the term "pangen" for "the smallest particle one hereditary characteristic". Danish botanist Wilhelm Johannsen coined the word "gene" ("gen" in Danish and German) in 1909 to describe the fundamental physical and functional units of heredity, while the related word genetics was first used by William Bateson in 1905. He derived the word from de Vries' "pangen". In the early 1900s, Mendel's work received renewed attention from scientists. In 1910, Thomas Hunt Morgan showed that genes reside on specific chromosomes. He later showed that genes occupy specific locations on the chromosome. With this knowledge, Morgan and his students began the first chromosomal map of the fruit fly Drosophila. In 1928, Frederick Griffith showed that genes could be transferred. In what is now known as Griffith's experiment, injections into a mouse of a deadly strain of bacteria that had been heat-killed transferred genetic information to a safe strain of the same bacteria, killing the mouse.

A series of subsequent discoveries led to the realization decades later that chromosomes within cells are the carriers of genetic material, and that they are made of DNA (deoxyribonucleic acid), a polymeric molecule found in all cells on which the 'discrete units' of Mendelian inheritance are encoded. In 1941, George Wells Beadle and Edward Lawrie Tatum showed that mutations in genes caused errors in specific steps in metabolic pathways. This showed that specific genes code for specific proteins, leading to the "one gene, one enzyme" hypothesis. Oswald Avery, Colin Munro MacLeod, and Maclyn McCarty showed in 1944 that DNA holds the gene's information. In 1953, James D. Watson and Francis Crick demonstrated the molecular structure of DNA. Together, these discoveries established the central dogma of molecular biology, which states that proteins are translated from RNA which is transcribed from DNA. This dogma has since been shown to have exceptions, such as reverse transcription in retroviruses.

In 1972, Walter Fiers and his team at the Laboratory of Molecular Biology of the University of Ghent (Ghent, Belgium) were the first to determine the sequence of a gene: the gene for Bacteriophage MS2 coat protein. Richard J. Roberts and Phillip Sharp discovered in 1977 that genes can be split into segments. This led to the idea that one gene can make several proteins. Recently (as of 2003–2006), biological results let the notion of gene appear more slippery. In particular, genes do not seem to sit side by side on DNA like discrete beads. Instead, regions of the DNA producing distinct proteins may overlap, so that the idea emerges that "genes are one long continuum". It was first hypothesized in 1986 by Walter Gilbert that neither DNA nor protein would be required in such a primitive system as that of a very early stage of the earth if RNA could perform as simply a catalyst and genetic information storage processor.

The modern study of genetics at the level of DNA is known as molecular genetics and the synthesis of molecular genetics with traditional Darwinian evolution is known as the modern evolutionary synthesis.