The Croonian Lecture, 1975 Nucleotide sequences in DNA

Abstract

DNA, the chemical component of the gene, plays a central role in biology and contains the whole information for the development of an organism, coded in the form of sequences of the four nucleotide residues. The lecture describes the development and application of some methods that can be employed to deduce sequences in these very large molecules. Special attention has been applied to a rapid simple method in which DNA polymerase is primed with specific oligonucleotide primers, thus making it possible to study small sections of radioactively labelled DNA. The techniques have been applied to the single-stranded DNA of bacteriophage ϕ X 174, and two sequences of about 250 nucleotides long have been deduced and related to the amino acid sequences of the proteins for which they code.