Important research in South University.

June 18, 2010

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In every loving family when a baby is born, sensitive parents, aunts, uncles and grandparents think he is the most beautiful thing on earth. With eagerness, just a couple of hours following his birth, they try to find familiar movements, as well as familiar facial features and expressions. "He has his father's eyes, or his mother's" or whatever.

Since prehistoric days our ancestors have known that living things inherit traits from their parents. Actually they have used this knowledge to improve animals and crop plants through selective breeding techniques.

Before and during 1800s, there were several theories of inheritance, but the modern science of genetics has its origins in the work developed by Gregor Johann Mendel, a German-Czech Augustinian monk and scientist who studied the nature of inheritance in plants.

His paper "Experiments on Plant Hybridization" was published in 1866, and today scientists consider it a seminal work. Mendel observed that organisms inherit traits via discrete units of inheritance, which are now called genes.

Since those days till now there had been a lot of discoveries and advances in genetics. In 1871 a Swiss physician and biologist called Johannes Friedrich Miescher discovered a substance that was going to be named "nucleic acid" which was an important step forward the identification of DNA as the carrier of inheritance.

In 1944 Oswald Theodore Avery, with his co-workers Colin MacLeod and Maclyn McCarty were the authors of a scientific paper in which they described their discovery: genes and chromosomes are made of DNA.

In the 1970s methods were invented for using enzymes to rework DNA and modern genetic engineering began around 1973 when Herbert Boyer, Stanley Cohen and Annie Chang used enzymes to cut a bacteria plasmid and insert another strand of DNA in the gap.

Recently by example, &#&South University&#& School of Pharmacy Professor, Samit Shah, Ph.D., R.Ph. was part of a research team that represents an important advancement in the field of chemical biology.

In this research it is described a detailed analysis of the chemistry associated with modifying nucleic acids by using specific technical methods to discover key features about the chemical reaction of caging groups with nucleic acids. It helps in further refining a method used to control the process of RNA interference (RNAi) with light.

Dr. Shah, who joined &#&South University&#& in July 2008, where he teaches Medicinal Chemistry, Biochemistry, and Molecular Biology, says about this research "Eventually, the results of the research could be beneficial for a range of applications such as tissue engineering and targeted chemotherapy."

The Faculty of 1000, an independent research service that reviews the most important papers in the biological sciences gave this research, previously published in the chemistry journal Angewandte Chemie, the status as the most-viewed article in the world in the field of chemical biology.