Discovery
The period gene and three mutants (perS, perL, and per0) were isolated in an EMS mutagenesis screen by Ronald Konopka and Seymour Benzer in 1971. The perS, perL, and per0 mutations were found to complement each other, so it was concluded that the three phenotypes were due to mutations in the same gene. The discovery of mutants that altered the period of circadian rhythms in eclosion and locomotor activity (perS and perL) indicated the role of the per gene in the clock itself and not an output pathway. The period gene was first sequenced in 1984 by Michael Rosbash and colleagues. In 1998, it was discovered that per produces two transcripts (differing only by the alternative splicing of a single untranslated intron) which both encode the PER protein.
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Famous quotes containing the word discovery:
“We early arrive at the great discovery that there is one mind common to all individual men: that what is individual is less than what is universal ... that error, vice and disease have their seat in the superficial or individual nature.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“Next to the striking of fire and the discovery of the wheel, the greatest triumph of what we call civilization was the domestication of the human male.”
—Max Lerner (b. 1902)
“I have known no experience more distressing than the discovery that Negroes didn’t love me. Unutterable loneliness claimed me. I felt without roots, like a man without a country ...”
—Sarah Patton Boyle, U.S. civil rights activist and author. The Desegregated Heart, part 1, ch. 10 (1962)