ABSTRACT
The cracking of the genetic code is arguably the greatest biomedical research discovery in the last 150 years. This chapter addresses how over many years a village of scientists from across the globe worked in parallel on different aspects of the same problem trying to arrive at a solution: how does the sequence of DNA ultimately dictate the specific amino acid composition of the proteins that it codes for? In this chapter, the brilliant work led by Marshall Nirenberg and his colleagues and the experimental system they used to crack the genetic code are explained. Also detailed is the way that triplets or codons of DNA nucleotides are first transcribed into messenger RNA (mRNA) and specify the insertion of select amino acids carried by transfer RNA (tRNA) molecules and incorporated into a nascent polypeptide chain on the ribosome. The enormous significance of understanding the genetic code and the bearing on future biomedical research and biomedicine are emphasized.
