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What did Seymour Benzer discover?

What did Seymour Benzer discover?

In later years, Benzer turned his attention to the genetic control of ageing, discovering mutations that cause degeneration of the brain (Swiss cheese) or extended lifespan (Methuselah) in Drosophila, and opening the way to using the fruitfly as a model system in which to study neurodegenerative diseases such as …

Did Seymour Benzer win a Nobel prize?

But he never received the Nobel itself, either for his extraordinary work on the gene or for his seminal work in neurogenetics. And because of that, Seymour said, tongue-in-cheek, his mother regarded him as a failure. “These other prizes don’t mean anything to the neighbors”, she told him [1].

How many primary deletion mutants did Benzer use?

Using a set of six, non-overlapping deletion mutants spanning the entire rII region and crossing more than 2000 rII point mutants with them, Benzer was able to assign each point mutant to a small sub-region.

How did Benzer identify deletion mutants of t4 phage?

In his early work, he identified two separate but very close loci within the rII region, which he suggested were nucleotide sequences that encoded different polypeptides; he called these “cistrons”. Benzer identified a number of different types of r mutants. Some he classified as deletions, others as point mutations.

Who was Seymour Benzer and what did he do?

Hermann Muller received the 1946 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for his work on mutations induced by X-rays. Seymour Benzer used genetics to prove that mutations were caused by changes in the DNA sequence. Seymour Benzer was born in 1921 and grew up in the Bensonhurst neighborhood of Brooklyn, NY.

When did Seymour Benzer win the Nobel Prize?

Benzer received the Crafoord Prize in 1993 for his pioneering work in genes and behavior. He won the Albany Medical Center Prize in Medicine and Biomedical Research (2006), which has been called the American Nobel Prize, for demonstrating that single gene mutations in Drosophila can greatly affect behavior.

How did Seymour Benzer prove that genes are linear?

Taking advantage of the enormous number of recombinants that could be analyzed in the rII mutant system, Benzer was eventually able to map over 2400 rII mutations. The data he collected provided the first evidence that the gene is not an indivisible entity, as previously believed, and that genes were linear.

When did Dotty Benzer get diagnosed with breast cancer?

In 1978, Dotty was in the hospital with breast cancer, and Seymour’s friend, colleague, and mentor Max Delbrück was diagnosed with cancer. Consequently, Seymour Benzer took interest in cancer biology and attended several conferences on breast cancer.