Prior to the work of Hershey and Chase, scientists thought that inheritance involved “nucleoproteins.” The amount of information to be transmitted between generations did not seem consistent with the chemical simplicity of the few nucleotides found in polymers of deoxyribonucleic acids in comparison to the diversity of protein polymers. Briefly explain:
- the relationship between the structure of polymeric DNA and the information stored
- the relationship between the interactions between base pairs on complementary strands of the double helix and Chargaff’s observation on the relative abundance of nucleotides in DNA
- the meaning of the statement from the Nature publication on the structure of DNA by Watson and Crick: “It has not escaped our notice that the specific pairing we have postulated immediately suggests a possible copying mechanism for the genetic material.”