Science Tuition Presents Frederick Sanger

Hi and welcome back to Science Tuition. Hope we are helping you become more competent in chemistry. Keeping up with the pace, in this Science Tuition lesson we are going to learn about one more famous chemist. Let us see whose door we are knocking on today.

It is Frederick Sanger. He was born on 13 August 1918. He was a British biochemist who has won the Nobel Prize in chemistry twice. He got his first Nobel Prize for his work on the structure of proteins, especially that of insulin and for his second Nobel, he shared his prize with Walter Gilbert for the work on the determination of base sequences in nucleic acids. He determined the complete amino acid sequence and proved that proteins have a defined chemical composition.
Let’s have a brief look at his works which got him the Nobel Prize twice.

Proteins are molecules made up of chains of amino acids and they play a pivotal role in the life processes in our cells. Insulin is a hormone that is an important protein too and regulates the sugar content in the blood. Frederick Sanger studied the composition of the insulin molecule by using acids to break the molecule into smaller parts, which were further separated from one another with the help of electrophoresis and chromatography. In the later analyses, he determined the amino acids sequences in the molecule’s two chains and in 1955 he identified how the chains are linked together. This got him the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in the year 1958.

DNA molecules are formed by nucleotides. By establishing the order of the nucleotides within the DNA molecule, an organism’s genome can be mapped. In 1977 Frederick Sanger developed a method using dideoxynucleotides. These can be inserted into the DNA chain, but at a certain nucleotide, they stop the growth of the chain so that fragments of different length are created. The nucleotide sequences in a DNA sample can be identified after undergoing electrophoresis. This observation won him the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for the second time in 1980.

That is all for today on Science Tuition. Stay tuned to learn more about such chemistry information. At Miracle Learning Centre, while learning Science you will also get to know about some extraordinary stories about some world famous Scientists who had a remarkable life. This is all to generate interest in you to learn more.

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