It is a simple yet provoking experiment that has been accepted by a lot of scientists.
This experiment is the most accepted model to demonstrate the replicative model of DNA. The scientists claimed that the two strands wer… Semi conservative DNA Replication through Meselson and Stahl’s Experiment. The debate began when James Watson and Francis Crick at the University of Cambridge in Cambridge, England, published a paper on the genetic implications of their proposed structure of DNA in May 1953. In 1958, Matthew Meselson and Franklin Stahl conducted an experiment on E.coli which divides in 20 minutes, to study the replication of DNA. They accomplished this by labeling cells with different stable isotopes of nitrogen. The methods Meselson and Stahl developed allowed them to distinguish existing DNA from newly synthesized DNA and to track new and old DNA over several rounds of replication.
The Meselson-Stahl experiment stemmed from a debate in the 1950s among scientists about how DNA replicated, or copied, itself. The Watson-Crick model represented DNA as two helical strands, each its own molecule, wound tightly together in a double helix. Matt Meselson and Franklin Stahl originally met in the summer of 1954, the year after Watson and Crick published their paper on the structure of DNA. Then in 1958, Matthew Meselson and Franklin Stahl presented their research, where they concluded that the replication of DNA is semiconservative type.
The Meselson and Stahl experiment did not only provide evidence for the semi-conservative theory which was put forward by Wa…
This knowledge granted the vision to peek into hereditary diseases and disorders. Matthew Meselson and Franklin Stahl have conducted their experiments after the discovery of DNA structure by the two scientists Watson and Crick.
This experiment provided modern biology with the knowledge of DNA replication.
Despite the affirmative result provided by the experiment of the Meselson-Stahl, it took a few years for acceptance by the scientific community. Meselson and Stahl Experiment was an experimental proof for semiconservative DNA replication.