If the link isn't colored, the activity hasn't yet been posted
| Sort | Content | Brief description | Link |
|---|---|---|---|
| 20 | Nobel prize for Drosophila body plan | Before: where does a fly body plan come from? After: we're done here. It's successive division into bands |
paper analysis |
| 11 | Counting 'letters' in genetic code 'words' | Before: is it 3? 4? And we know nothing about implementation :-( After: OK, which 3-letter words mean which amino acid? We're good on stop codons & degeneracy |
tBio Cricket the paper |
| 13 | How enzymes come to be | This is a deep and rich review paper covering many aspects. I think the use of substrate analogs (pp. 323-4) is particularly brilliant in separating models: pre-enzymes achieve shape to become active, or are created | paper |
| 6 | Molecules are 3-dimensional | This is a summary, but it's pretty awesome. By counting isomers, predictions of a model of tetrahedral carbon bests one that is planar | link |
| 2 | The Periodic Table | A summary, but well-written and lots here | website |
| 12 | Meselson-Stahl: semiconservative replication | Everyone loves this one. But the FOUNDATION is often skipped. The key insight: how to make 'old' DNA different from 'new' DNA--and detect the difference. | link |
| 5 | Mendel | Mendel's excellence as an experimentalist bears highlighting. He picked peas for a reason. He thought about characters to use. He thought about strains to use. He spent 2 years establishing 'reliable' strains. | paper |
| 7 | Scrambled ribonuclease | Wonderful, simple experiment demonstrating that protein folding information was innate to the amino acid string. | |
| 9 | Crick invents tRNA | This was a newsletter to colleagues in which he predicted tRNAs to resolve challenges in the question "How can nucleic acids 'mean' amino acids?" Predicts the 20 synthetases, among other things. |
Actual |
| 25 | tRNA 3rd position 'wobbling' | I think the arts of 'figuring out' and 'thinking forward' are neglected in current teaching (and too often practice) of science. By looking at the filled in codon table, thinking about interactions, and knowing about basepairing, Crick proposeswobble. Too bad a Brit nailed it, or it'd be 'wiggle' | Paper as .pdf |
| 25 | Whodunnit: is the genetic material DNA or protein? | Choice of experimental system and the clever use of a blender to break the phage's grasp on its host combine to show that the information flows with the DNA, not the Protein. Also critical: each of these things is not like the other. | Actual |
| 100 | An alternate collection | This looks like a really neat idea--students in a class study and summarize a 'great' | Blog of Experiments |