Champe here revealed that he had resumed research with the rII mutants of the bacterial viruses T2 (phage), which had been used since the early 1950s in genetic mapping experiments. These experiments were designed to break up genes into their component parts, eventually down to the level of individual bases--at a time when biochemical means of sequencing the bases of DNA were several years in the future.
One goal of researchers had been to map changes in the mutant strain rII to changes in the amino acid sequence of the protein for which it coded. (Upon infection viral nucleoprotein, an assembly of nucleic acid and protein, enters the bacterial cell, where it induces the synthesis of more viral nucleoprotein, which is released when the cell ruptures.) However, the protein for which rII coded had never been found. Champ and his co-workers resumed the search in the fall of 1966.
Number of Image Pages:
2 (177,551 Bytes)
Date:
1966-10-09 (October 9, 1966)
Creator:
Champe, Sewell
Recipient:
Crick, Francis
Source:
Original Repository: Wellcome Library for the History and Understanding of Medicine. Francis Harry Compton Crick Papers
Letter from Francis Crick to Sewell Champe (October 24, 1966)