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A little thread to honour Sydney Brenner. There was a time when molecular biology was heresy and closer to theoretical biology than experimental biology. Working hand in hand with Crick and others, Sydney laid the foundations of modern biology. 1/ webofstories.com/play/sydney.br…
In 1957 he published what one could almost call the first bioinformatics paper. Using the published sequences of short peptides from 7 proteins from Sanger and others, he demonstrated the impossibility of fully overlapping genetic codes. 2/ ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/P…
He shared his office with Crick for 15 years. There he coined the word "codon" and helped Crick formulate the existence of tRNA. In a moment of inspiration he first guessed the existence of mRNA, and then proved it experimentally with Fracois Jacob. 3/ webofstories.com/play/sydney.br…
Using frameshift mutations, which he co-discovered with Crick, they demonstrated the triplet nature of the genetic code. He also discovered the sequence of the three stop codons and in doing so completed the genetic code. 4/ en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crick,_Br…
Once the basis of replication and translation were established in the late 60s, he decided that the main questions in molecular biology had been answered and looked for new challenges. To understand development, he went on to establish C.elegans as a model organism. 5/
This led to Sulston's cell lineage and Horvitz's apoptosis, which ultimately earned Sydney a belated Nobel prize. Captivated by genome sequences, he then taught himself computer programming making pioneering contributions to bioinformatics and genomics. 6/ nobelprize.org/prizes/medicin…
Late in life he travelled the world inspiring students everywhere and founding new institutes across the world. I remember him give a talk at 84. He threw his cane away and spent an hour passionately scribbling in a whiteboard about his latest results mining public genomes.
I should have added that Sydney had very humble origins. He was born in a poor family of immigrants in South Africa. He often said that he taught himself to read at the age of 4 by playing with newspaper pages used as tablecloths. The local public library opened him to the world.
In this beautiful interview by @matthewcobb, you can hear Sydney and Crick remember those early days of molecular biology. bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/w3…
