What was Oswald Avery's discovery?
Category:
science
genetics
Oswald Theodore Avery Jr.
Avery was one of the first molecular biologists and a pioneer in immunochemistry, but he is best known for the experiment (published in 1944 with his co-workers Colin MacLeod and Maclyn McCarty) that isolated DNA as the material of which genes and chromosomes are made.
Similarly one may ask, what was Oswald Avery's experiment?
In a very simple experiment, Oswald Avery's group showed that DNA was the "transforming principle." When isolated from one strain of bacteria, DNA was able to transform another strain and confer characteristics onto that second strain. DNA was carrying hereditary information.
Hereof, when did Oswald Avery discover DNA?
1944
Although many scientists acknowledge the impact of Avery's work on the field of molecular biology, Oswald Avery did not win a Nobel Prize. The reason might be that Avery never publicly stated that a gene is made of DNA. In his paper, Avery showed that DNA is the transforming principle.