General

Cold Spring Harbor Symposia on Quantitative Biology. 1966. The Genetic Code. Vol. 31. Cold Spring Harbor, NY: Cold Spring Harbor Laboratories. The symposium was held when the genetic code was being completed; the introduction by Francis Crick gives a fascinating portrait of where things stood and where they were going.

Crick, F.H.C. 1988. What Mad Pursuit: A Personal View of Scientific Discovery. New York: Basic Books. A wonderful account of Crick’s personal odyssey in science.

Vogel, G. 1998. Tracking the history of the genetic code. Science 281:329–331.

Deciphering the Genetic Code: tRNA as Adaptor

Crick, F.H.C. 1970. Central dogma of molecular biology. Nature 227:561–563. The classic paper in which Crick proposes the central dogma of information flow in biology.

Hoagland, M.B., M.L. Stephenson, J.F. Scott, L.I. Hecht, and P.C. Zamecnik. 1958. A soluble ribonucleic acid intermediate in protein synthesis. J. Biol. Chem. 231:241–257. The report that identified aminoacylated tRNA as Crick’s adaptor molecule.

Holley, R.W., J.H. Apgar, G.A. Everett, J.T. Madison, M. Marquisse, S.H. Merrill, J.R. Penswick, and A. Zamir. 1965. Structure of a ribonucleic acid. Science 147:1462–1465. This documents the first structure of a tRNA, yeast tRNA^Ala; the putative anticodon contains the unusual nucleotide inosine.

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The Rules of the Code

Brenner, S., A.O. Stretton, and S. Kaplan, S. 1965. Genetic code: The “nonsense” triplets for chain termination and their suppression. Nature 206:994–998.

Dintzis, H.M. 1961. Assembly of the peptide chains of hemoglobin. Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. USA 47:247–261. Ingenious experiments determined the direction in which proteins are synthesized.

Yanofsky, C., B.C. Carlton, J.R. Guest, D.R. Helinski, and U. Henning. 1964. On the colinearity of gene structure and protein structure. Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. USA 51:266–272. Different mutations in an enzyme are used to deduce that the linear order of mutations in a gene correspond to the linear order in the protein.

Cracking the Code

Khorana, H.G., H. Buchi, H. Ghosh, N. Gupta, T.M. Jacob, H. Kossel, R. Morgan, S.A. Narang, E. Ohtsuka, and R.D. Wells. 1966. Polynucleotide synthesis and the genetic code. Cold Spring Harb. Symp. Quant. Biol. 31:39–49.

Nirenberg, M.W., and J.H. Matthaei. 1961. The dependence of cell-free protein synthesis in E. coli upon naturally occurring or synthetic polyribonucleotides. Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. USA 47:1588–1602. The first study that outlined an experimental approach to crack the genetic code.

Speyer, J.F., P. Lengyel, C. Basilio, A.J. Wahba, R.S. Gardner, and S. Ochoa. 1963. Synthetic polynucleotides and the amino acid code. Cold Spring Harb. Symp. Quant. Biol. 28:559–567.

Exceptions Proving the Rules

Fox, T.D. 1987. Natural variation in the genetic code. Annu. Rev. Genet. 21:67–91.

Knight, R.D., S.J. Freeland, and L.F. Landweber. 2001. Rewiring the keyboard: Evolvability of the genetic code. Nat. Rev. Genet. 2:49–58.