History
In 1881, the organism, known as the pneumococcus for its role as an etiologic agent of pneumonia, was first isolated simultaneously and independently by the U.S Army physician George Sternberg and the French chemist Louis Pasteur.
The organism was termed Diplococcus pneumoniae from 1920 because of its characteristic appearance in Gram-stained sputum. It was renamed Streptococcus pneumoniae in 1974 because of its growth in chains in liquid media.
S. pneumoniae played a central role in demonstrating genetic material consists of DNA. In 1928, Frederick Griffith demonstrated transformation of life, turning harmless pneumococcus into a lethal form by co-inoculating the live pneumococci into a mouse along with heat-killed, virulent pneumococci. In 1944, Oswald Avery, Colin MacLeod, and Maclyn McCarty demonstrated the transforming factor in Griffith's experiment was DNA, not protein, as was widely believed at the time. Avery's work marked the birth of the molecular era of genetics.
Read more about this topic: Streptococcus Pneumoniae
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