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Erwin Chargaff's research paved the way for the discoveries of DNA's structure and its method of replication. His observation that DNA varies from species to species made it highly credible that DNA was genetic material. His identification of 1:1 ratios in DNA's bases allowed James Watson and Francis Crick to see.
During his time at Columbia, Chargaff published numerous scientific papers, dealing primarily with the study of nucleic acids such as DNA using chromatographic techniques. He became interested in DNA in 1944 after Oswald Avery identified the molecule as the basis of heredity .
One other key piece of information related to the structure of DNA came from Austrian biochemist Erwin Chargaff. Chargaff analyzed the DNA of different species, determining its composition of A, T, C, and G bases. He made several key observations: A, T, C, and G were not found in equal quantities (as some models at the time would have predicted)
His two main discoveries,(i) that in any double-stranded DNA the number of guanine units equals thenumber of cytosine units and the number of adenine units equals the number ofthymine units and (ii) that the composition of DNA varies from one species toanother, are now known as Chargaff's Rules.
The biochemist Erwin Chargaff had found that while the amount of DNA and of its four types of bases--the purine bases adenine (A) and guanine (G), and the pyrimidine bases cytosine (C) and thymine (T)--varied widely from species to species, A and T always appeared in ratios of one-to-one, as did G and C. Maurice Wilkins and Rosalind Franklin had...
Jun 20, 2002 · ( b. Czernowitz, Austria-Hungary, 11 August 1905; d. New York, New York, 20 June 2002), molecular biology. Chargaff is best known for his discovery of DNA “base ratios,” also known as “Chargaff’s rules,” in the late 1940s, while working at Columbia University in New York City.
Erwin Chargaff was one of those men, making two discoveries that led James Watson and Francis Crick to the double helix structure of DNA. At first, Chargaff noticed that DNA – whether taken from a plant or animal – contained equal amounts of adenine and thymine and equal amounts of cytosine and guanine.
