science · 10 June 1955 · 69 years ago
In 1955, the first U.S. report was made of the separation of a virus into component parts. This work was performed on the tobacco virus, which furthermore could be reconstructed from those parts to produce a material as effective as the virus in its original form in producing disease in tabacco and other plants. They demonstrated that tobacco mosaic virus (TMV) spontaneously formed when mixtures of purified coat protein and its genomic RNA were incubated together, i.e. the structure that TMV adopts is self-ordered and corresponds to a free energy minimum. The report covered the research work of Drs. Heinz L. Fraenkel-Conrat and Robley Williams at the Virus Laboratory of the University of California at Berkeley.
OnThisDay.net