Background
Okazaki was born in Hiroshima, Japan.
岡崎 令治
biochemist geneticist university professor molecular biologist
Okazaki was born in Hiroshima, Japan.
He graduated in 1953 from Nagoya University, and worked as a professor there after 1963.
He died of leukemia (sequelae of Atomic bombings of Hiroshima) in 1975 at the age of 44. He had been heavily irradiated in Hiroshima when the first atomic bomb was dropped. In 1968, Okazaki discovered the way in which the lagging strand of deoxyribonucleic acid is replicated via fragments, now called Okazaki fragments.
The experiments by his group used East. coli.
After introducing 3T-thymidine for only ten seconds to East. coli during deoxyribonucleic acid replication, he placed the sample in a test tube of alkaline sucrose. The larger, heavier deoxyribonucleic acid flowed to the bottom of the test tube, while the smaller, lighter deoxyribonucleic acid did not.
When samples were taken from the bottom of the test tube, it was found that half were heavy and half were light, proving that half of the deoxyribonucleic acid was complete and half was in fragments. Then he took a sample of East. coli deoxyribonucleic acid that had been synthesized for an additional five seconds, and found all the activity now resulted in the larger molecular weight.
Therefore, there were no longer any fragments.
This proved that during the five second chase, the Ribonucleic acid primer was removed by deoxyribonucleic acid polymerase I, and the bases were joined together by deoxyribonucleic acid ligase, leaving the newly synthesized deoxyribonucleic acid fully mature and repaired.
