Question

Describe one early idea about heredity that was shown to be false by Frederick Gniffithis research with preditoss bacteria.

Answer 1

The early idea about heredity that was shown to be false by Frederick Griffith's research was the idea that hereditary traits were passed down from one generation to the next exclusively through the transmission of proteins. Griffith's experiments showed that the transforming substance responsible for the transfer of genetic traits from one bacterial strain to another was not a protein, but rather a nucleic acid.

Answer 2

One early idea about heredity that was shown to be false by Frederick Griffith's research was the concept of "blending inheritance." This idea suggested that the traits of offspring were a mixture of the traits of their parents.

Griffith's experiments with Streptococcus pneumoniae in the 1920s showed that this was not the case. He discovered that some strains of the bacteria were virulent, while others were non-virulent. When he injected mice with the non-virulent strain, they remained healthy. However, when he injected mice with the virulent strain, they became sick and died.

Griffith then made a surprising discovery: when he injected mice with a mixture of the non-virulent and virulent strains, the mice became sick and died, and the virulent strain could be recovered from their bodies. This suggested that something from the virulent strain had been transferred to the non-virulent strain, making it virulent as well.

This transformation was later shown to be due to the transfer of genetic material from the virulent strain to the non-virulent strain. This discovery challenged the concept of blending inheritance, showing that genetic information could be transferred intact between organisms. This paved the way for the discovery of DNA as the molecule responsible for transmitting genetic information.

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