DNA/Timelines

1866: Gregor Mendel identifies inheritance "factors" in pea plants. 1869: Friedrich Miescher isolates “nuclein” (DNA) from infected wounds. 1900: Karl Correns, Hugo de Vries and Erich von Tschermak independently rediscover Mendel's laws. 1910: Thomas Hunt Morgan proposed a theory of sex-linked inheritance for the first mutation discovered in the fruit fly, Drosophila, white eye. 1913: Morgan and Alfred Sturtevant propose principle of gene linkage leading to the first genetic map. 1927: Hermann J. Muller Used x-rays to cause artificial gene mutations in Drosophila. 1928: Frederick Griffith demonstrates a "transforming factor" that can transmit the ability of bacteria to cause pneumonia in mice.

1929: Phoebus Levene describes building blocks of DNA, including four types of base A,C, T, and G.

1931: Harriet Creighton and Barbara McClintock Demonstrated the cytological proof for crossing-over in maize.

1941: George Beadle and Edward Tatum prove that a gene can produce its effect by regulating particular enzymes.

1944: Oswald Avery, Colin MacLeod, and Maclyn McCarty purified the transforming factor proposed in Griffith's experiment and show it is not protein, but DNA.

Late 1940s: Barbara McClintock developed the hypothesis of transposable elements.

1950: Alfred Hershey and Martha Chase use bacteriophage to confirm DNA is the molecule of heredity.

1950: Erwin Chargaff discovered a one-to-one ratio of A:T and G:C in DNA samples from a variety of organisms.

1951: Rosalind Franklin created a high quality X-ray diffraction photograph to reveal more detail of the repeating structure of DNA.

1953: Francis Crick and James Watson deduce the three-dimensional structure of the DNA molecule using a combination of experimental data and model building.

1958: Arthur Kornberg purified a DNA polymerase from bacteria, and used it to synthesis DNA in a test tube.

1958: Matthew Meselson and Franklin Stahl demonstrated that DNA replicates by a semi-conservative mechanism.

1966: Marshall Nirenberg and Gobind Khorana crack the genetic code linking the DNA sequence of nucleotides to the protein sequence of amino acid residues.

1967: Discovery of DNA ligase.

1969: FISH

1970: Howard Temin discovered the of activity of reverse transcriptase.

1970: Hamilton Smith and Kent Wilcox isolated the first restriction enzyme, HindII, that cuts DNA at a very specific nucleotide sequence.

1972: Paul Berg creates the first recombinant DNA molecules, using restriction enzymes. This technology will be the beginning of the biotechnology industry.

1973: Annie Chang and Stanley Cohen showed that a recombinant DNA molecule can be maintained and replicated in E. coli.

1973: Joseph Sambrook refined DNA electrophoresis (first described in 1953) by using an agarose gel and staining the DNA with ethidium bromide.

1975: An International meeting at Asilomar, California provided guidelines regulating recombinant DNA experimentation.

1975: Ed Southern developed the Southern blot for DNA. This name inspires similar blotting techniques for RNA (northern blot) and protein (western blot).

1976: Herbert Boyer cofounds Genentech, the first firm founded in the United States to apply recombinant DNA technology

1977: Frederick Sanger, Allan Maxam, and Walter Gilbert developed the chain termination (dideoxy) method for sequencing DNA.

1978: Somatostatin, which regulates human growth hormones, is the first human protein made using recombinant technology.

1980: Mark Skolnick, Ray White, David Botstein, and Ronald Davis create RFLP marker map of human genome.

1981: Three independent research teams announced the discovery of human oncogenes (cancer genes).

1983: James Gusella demonstrate that the Huntington's disease gene is on chromosome 4.

1985: Kary Mullis published a paper describing the polymerase chain reaction (PCR) a technique to amplify specific DNA sequences from minutes quantities of starting material.

1985: Alec Jeffreys devised a technique that uses DNA polymorphisms to distinguish between different individuals. He later coined the term DNA fingerprinting and this is now impotant for many paternity, immigration, and murder cases.

1986: Leroy Hood and Lloyd Smith automate DNA sequencing with the goal of sequencing whole genomes.

1987: US DOE officially begins human genome project.

1990: BLAST algorithm developed to align DNA sequences and is the key to comparative genomics.

1990: The first occurance of gene replacement therapy to repair a defective ADA gene in a four year old girls T-cells.

1993: FlavrSavr tomatoes are the first genetically modified organisms to be marketed. They were engineered to ripen more slowly for longer shelf life.

1995: Patrick Brown and Stanford University colleagues invent DNA microarray technology.

1995: Researchers at The Institute for Genomic Research publish first genome sequence of free-living organism: Haemophilus influenzae.

1998: NIH begins the Single Nucleotide Polymorphism (SNP) project to reveal human genetic variation.

1999: First human chromosome sequence published.

2000: Fruit fly genome sequenced using Celera’s whole-genome shotgun method.

2001: Science and Nature publish annotations and analyses of human genome.

2005: HapMap published giving a huge resource of SNP's and information relating to human variation.