Collection context
Summary
- Abstract:
- Published articles and offprints by scientist Rosalind Franklin relating to her studies of proteins associated with the tobacco mosaic virus.
- Extent:
- .25 Linear feet (1 custom box containing 30 loose offprints)
- Language:
- English .
- Preferred citation:
-
Rosalind Franklin Published Articles and Off-prints. MSS 869. Special Collections & Archives, UC San Diego Library.
Background
- Scope and content:
-
A collection of scientist Rosalind Franklin's (1920-1958) published articles and offprints relating to her studies of the proteins associated with the tobacco mosaic virus.
After Rosalind Franklin left King's College, she began investigations on the tobacco mosaic virus that gave seminal insights into the structure and role of RNA. This work was highly regarded by her scientific peers. It was instrumental in determining the genetic code, and how viruses work. She continued working right up until her death in 1958. "In the last years of her life, Rosalind did beautiful work. How much Rosalind did on viruses between 1953 and 1958 is amazing. The list of publications is staggering...All this was pioneering work [and] immensely complex, far more testing, in a technical sense, than the DNA work...It was also of very great importance…from TMV most of the fundamental information about viruses was first obtained [and it was] the first substance in which regulatory protein-nucleic acid interaction was studied... Very little in general was known about the structure of viruses, so that what she had accomplished by 1958 in working out a plan for the structure of TMV represented a giant step taken"(Anne Sayre, Rosalind Franklin and DNA, pp. 178-179). Franklin "succeeded in obtaining spectacular X-ray patterns of the virus that allowed her to determine the precise helical geometry of the protein sub-units, and, above all, to show that the ribonucleic acid (RNA) of the virus-the carrier of genetic information and hence infectivity-formed a long, single chain embedded deeply within the protein framework...[she] helped lay the foundations of structural molecular biology" (Aaron Klug, DNB1 Missing Persons volume).
- Biographical / historical:
-
Rosalind Franklin (1920-1958) was a British crystallographer and pioneering molecular biologist. At the Birkbeck College Crystallography Laboratory at the University of London, she began work on the tobacco mosaic virus that gave seminal insights into the structure and role of RNA. This work was insturmental in determining the genetic code, and how virsuses work. Between 1953-1958, eighteen publications emerged from the laboratory. Franklin succeeded in obtaining X-ray patterns of the virus that allowed her to determine the precise helical geometry of the protein sub-units, and to show that the ribonucleic acid (RNA) of the virus formed a long, single chain embedded deeply within the protien framework. This work laid the foundations fo the field of structural molecular biology.
A biological profile on Rosalind Franklin and her scientific impact is available through the National Library of Medicine (https://profiles.nlm.nih.gov/spotlight/kr/feature/biographical) as well as many other online sources.
- Acquisition information:
- Acquired approx. 2006
- Rules or conventions:
- Describing Archives: A Content Standard
Access and use
- Terms of access:
-
Publication rights are held by the creator of the collection.
- Preferred citation:
-
Rosalind Franklin Published Articles and Off-prints. MSS 869. Special Collections & Archives, UC San Diego Library.
- Location of this collection:
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9500 Gilman Drive, Dept. 0175La Jolla, CA 92093-0175, US
- Contact:
- (858) 534-2533