Interdisciplinary Bio Central SYNOPSIS Development of Information Biology (II)

A history of discoveries of a gene and DNA was viewed with respect to people, time and places. It started with G. Mendel and J. Meisher, who discovered a gene in a plant spe-cies in 1866 and DNA in animals in 1869, respectively. With recognition that DNA was a chemical substance, A. Kossel identified the four chemical components of DNA with-out knowing their biological function around the turn of the 19th century. On the oth-er hand F. Griffith found a peculiar activity in a bacterial species in 1928, but victimized by the war before understanding what it was. Those discoveries were made in Europe, but they were still fragmentary. Then, in USA, O. T. Avery, A. Hershey, M. Nirenberg and other scientists organized the European discoveries and elucidated their coordinat-ed biological functions in 1950’s and 1960’. Key Words: gene; DNA; bacterial transformation; phage; genetic code Subject areas; Bioinformatics/Computational biology/Molecular modeling Author contribution; Y.T. wrote this article. *Correspondence and requests for materials should be addressed to Y.T