Miescher, Friedrich

George Thomas Friedrich Miescher Institute, Maulbeerstrasse 66, Basel,... 

The phosphorus- and nitrogen-containing materials that came to be known as nucleic acids were first isolated from cells around 1870 by Friedrich Miescher but were long regarded as something of a curiosity.1 Nevertheless, the structures of the monomer units, the nucleotides, were established by 1909 and the correct polynucleotide structure of the chains of DNA and RNA was proposed by Levene and Tipson in 1935.2/3... 

Meischer F (1869) Letter I to Wilhelm His Tfibingen February 26th 1869. In W. His et al (eds) Die Histochemischen und Physiologischen Arbeiten von Friedrich Miescher—Aus dem wissenschaftlichen Briefwechsel von F. Miescher vol 1 FCW Vogel Leipzig pp 33-38... 

Fig. 2.2. Positive and negative adhesion of fibroblasts on fibronectin and tenascin coating of a tissue culture dish, after saturation with BSA. After I h of plating in serum-free medium, cells appear loosely attached on BSA, well spread on fibronectin and not attached on tenascin. Crystal violet staining. (Photograph courtesy of Ruth Chiquet, Friedrich Miescher Institute.)...

I wish to thank my colleagues in the Department of Zoology, Nottingham University for agreeing to my discussion of results of our collaborative research which are either in press or in preparation. I wish also to thank Dr G.E. Fagg of the Friedrich Miescher Institut, Basel, Switzerland for allowing me to quote from his paper (1) which is in press. 

In 1970, CIBA and GEIGY in Basle co-founded an institute for independent basic research in molecular biology. The foundation was named after Friedrich Miescher, who discovered nuclein. The institute s main activities he in the fields... 

The biochemical investigation of DNA began with Friedrich Miescher, who carried out the first systematic chemical studies of cell nuclei. In 1868 Miescher isolated a phosphorus-containing substance, which he called nuclein, from the nuclei of pus cells (leukocytes) obtained from discarded surgical bandages. He found nuclein to consist of an acidic portion, which we know today as DNA, and a basic portion, protein. Miescher later found a similar acidic substance in the heads of sperm cells from salmon. Although he partially purified nuclein and studied its properties, the covalent (primary) structure of DNA (as shown in Fig. 8-7) was not known with certainty until the late 1940s. 

The Swiss biologist, Friedrich Miescher, isolated DNA from salmon sperm in 1868. 

Extracted from the nucleus of human cells in the kitchen of Tubingen s castle (Germany), Nuclein is an heterogeneous product that was introduced in 1868 by Friedrich Miescher (1844-1895). Miescher s pupil, Richard Altmann (1852-1900),... 

The discovery in the 1860s of a new phosphate-containing biopolymer in cell nuclei by Friedrich Miescher began an understanding of inheritance from a molecnlar perspective. 

Natural compounds can be complex, beyond the ability of the early chemists to understand them. An excellent example is the first isolation of what proved many years later to be deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA). This was accomplished by Friedrich Miescher in Germany in 1869, who... 

Friedrich Miescher is generally given credit for being the first (1869) to isolate a cell organelle by centrifugation [ 163]. The protease stripped extract of the nucleus fraction of human pus, which he called nucleins, was later renamed by Altmann as nucleic acid, once its chemical nature had been established. 

DNA was first isolated in 1869 by Friedrich Miescher as a phosphorous-containing substance called nuclein (Dahm, 2008). In 1943, Oswald Avery and his colleagues discovered that DNA is the bearer of genetic information by permanently transforming a non-virulent form of the organism into a virulent form via transforming... 

R. Dahm, Discovering DNA Friedrich Miescher and the early years of nucleic... 

German biochemist Johann Friedrich Miescher (1844-95) discovers nucleic acid. 

We thank Inge Obergfoell of the Friedrich Miescher Institute in Basel, Switzerland, for the reproduction of the photographs. The yeast extract used in the experiment illustrated in Fig. 3 was kindly provided by Dr. Alessandra Vitelli of IRBM. 

JEAN-PIERRE JOST (345), Friedrich Miescher Institut, CH-4002 Basel, Switzerland JANET E. JOY (281), Laboratory of Biochemical Genetics, National Institute of Mental Health, Neuroscience Center at Saint Elizabeths, Washington, D.C. 20032 YASUFUMI KANEDA (50), Institute for Molecular and Cellular Biology, Osaka University, Suita City, Osaka 565, Japan... 

Friedrich Miescher-Institut, Postfach 2543, 4002 Basel, Switzerland... 

USDA-ARS Plant Hormone Laboratory. Beltsville Agricultural Research Center, Beltsville, MD 20705 and Department of Botany, University of Maryland, College Park, MD 20742 USA Current address Friedrich Miescher Institut. Postfach 2543,4002 Basel, Switzerland Current address Department of Horticulture, National Taiwan University, Taipei 10764. T aiwan ROC... 

Studies on these nucleoproteins were started in 1868 by Friedrich Miescher in an attempt to clarify the nature of the cell nucleus. He used materials consisting mainly of nuclei. First he found in the nuclei of pus cells nuclear protein fractions rich in phosphoric acid which he called nucleins (Miescher, 1870). Later he discovered in the sperm head of Rhine salmon a compound in which the nuclein was combined with a nitrogenous base in a salt-like linkage. The nuclein was a crude substance, later called nucleic acid. The nitrogenous base, obtained as the double salt of platinic chloride, was named protamine (Miescher, 1874, 1897). However, Miescher failed to observe the proteic nature of protamine , which thus remained unknown for about 20 years. 

The Tokyo group, making suitable use of these results, overcame the difficulties which had hampered structural studies of protamines and was able to obtain homogeneous components of clupeine and determine their complete amino-acid sequences (Ando et al. 1962 Ando and Suzuki, 1966, 1967 Ando et al.y 1967). Thus this question was finally settled about 100 years after the term protamine was coined by Friedrich Miescher. Our studies have established a general means of determining the primary structure of each component of a protamine. 

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