MOLECULAR

BIOLOGY
INTRODUCTION

SHERWIN B. TORIANO, RMT, MSMT

➢ Molecular biology is the branch of biology that
concerns the molecular basis of biological activity in
and between cells, including molecular synthesis,
modification, mechanisms and interactions.

➢ While researchers practice techniques specific to

molecular biology, it is common to combine these
with methods from genetics and biochemistry.
➢ In its modern sense, molecular biology attempts to explain the
phenomena of life starting from the macromolecular properties that
generate them. Two categories of macromolecules, in particular, are
the focus of the molecular biologist:
1) nucleic acids, among which the most famous is deoxyribonucleic
acid (or DNA), the constituent of genes
2) proteins, which are the active agents of living organisms.
➢ The central dogma of
molecular biology describes
the process in which DNA is
transcribed into RNA, then
translated into protein.
1930s

➢ The history of molecular biology begins in the 1930s with the convergence
of various, previously distinct biological and physical disciplines: genetics
biochemistry, microbiology, virology and physics. With the hope of
understanding life at its most fundamental level, numerous physicists and
chemists also took an interest in what would become molecular biology.

➢ In 1940, George Beadle and Edward Tatum demonstrated the existence

of a precise relationship between genes and proteins. From the genetics
mainstay Drosophila, they used a more appropriate model organism, the
fungus Neurospora; the construction and exploitation of new model
organisms would become a recurring theme in the development of
molecular biology.
1940s

➢ In 1944, Oswald Avery, working at the Rockefeller Institute of New York,

demonstrated that genes are made up of DNA (Avery–MacLeod–McCarty
experiment).

➢ In 1952, Alfred Hershey and Martha Chase confirmed that the genetic
material of the bacteriophage, the virus which infects bacteria, is made
up of DNA (Hershey–Chase experiment).
1950s

➢ In 1953, James Watson and Francis Crick discovered the double helical
structure of the DNA molecule based on the discoveries made by Rosalind
Franklin.

➢ In 1961, François Jacob and Jacques Monod demonstrated that the

products of certain genes regulated the expression of other genes by
acting upon specific sites at the edge of those genes. They also
hypothesized the existence of an intermediary between DNA and its
protein products, which they called messenger RNA.
1990s

➢ The resurgence of RNA structural biology in the mid-1990s has caused a

veritable explosion in the field of nucleic acid structural research. Some
of the most noteworthy examples include the structures of the Group I
and Group II introns, and the Ribosome solved by Nenad Ban and
colleagues.

➢ Most recently, the 2009 Nobel Prize in Chemistry was awarded to Ada
Yonath, Venkatraman Ramakrishnan and Thomas Steitz for their
structural work on the ribosome, demonstrating the prominent role RNA
structural biology has taken in modern molecular biology.