2007-9-17

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I like to do things beyond other's imagination much more than compete with others on a planed item and enjoy experiment and research much more that the final result.
              --Sanger

Frederic Sanger was a British Biologist born on August 13 of 1918 in Gloucestershire.
His father was a doctor. After graduated from University of Cambridge in 1939 he gained a degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the same university in 1943 and then started to work in a lab, where a strong team was formed by the participation of some famous biochemists such as Crick,Watson and Perutz etc.
Sanger was interested in searching after the precise structure of amino acid chains of protein molecules. Martin and Synge had successfully developed the technique of filter paper Chromatography,useful for people to know about the amount of every amino acid in one protein molecule.The next step was to specify precise position of every amino acid in the molecule chain.
For this purpose, firstly should dissociate molecules partially without touching small chains. In 1945 Sanger found out a compound named 2,4-Dinitrofluorobenzene (usually called Sanger's reagent),which could be added one end of the amino acid chain and could not be done on the other end.
He added this reagent on his acquired short chains and dissociated them to amino acids. Then by the technique of filter paper Chromatography Sanger discovered which amino acid touched with the reagent.
After that Sanger turned his interest in the research on some important insulin, which has been acquired by Banting and Best by the way of separating a quarter of a century ago. The insulin molecule is composed of about fifty kinds of amino acid distributed between two connected chains. Gradually he uncovered the short amino acid chain of insulin molecule by making use of his reagent
Then he inferred that the longest chain was nothing but the production of shot chains discovered by him.In such a way,he detected the structure of longer chains and in 1953 he made a great success to get the precise sequence of all kinds of amino acid in insulin.
Thanks to Sanger's achievement,other chemists defined the structure of more complicated compounds,for example,the team of Li Zhuohao detected the structure of ACTH; Du Vigneaud acquired the simple structure of amino acid chains of Oxytocin.OT and Vasopressin and even produced them by compounding.
Undoubtedly Sanger made a crucial success on the research of Chemistry of Protein, which was to lead greater achievements, so he was awarded with the Noble Prize of Chemistry in 1958.
What Sanger did was just to detect all kinds of amino acid of chains, abstractly, he just drew a straight line. Based upon that,Kendrew and Perutz did a further research:in 1960 they studied complete molecules of Myoglobin and Hemoglobin and specified each amino acid's precise position in 3-D structure.
After that, Sanger began to study the sequence of Ribonucleotide of nucleic acid molecules. In 1997 again he became one of the winners of Noble Prize of chemistry for his contrition to detect the all sequences of DNA molecules of minor virus.