GENERAL MICROBIOLOGY - T.P. Pyrog - 2004

19. BACTERIAL GENETICS: STABILITY, VARIATION, AND TRAIT TRANSMISSION

19.1. PROTEIN SYNTHESIS AND THE GENETIC CODE

Every living Organism shares most of its traits with its ancestors. The preservation of specific properties, i.e., the stability of characteristics across generations, is known as heredity. Genetics is the science of heredity and variation. In other words, genetics is the discipline that studies the TRANSMISSION OF TRAITS and the patterns of their inheritance. Each trait corresponds to a specific Gene as an information carrier. For a long time, it was believed that genes were proteinaceous in their chemical nature. In 1944, English scientists O. Avery, C.M. MacLeod, and M. McCarty demonstrated that DNA is the physical carrier of hereditary information, meaning that genes are composed of DNA.



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