Over
Lapping
Genes
For years scientists assumed that a mutation gene affected the production of a single protein. However, Frederick Sanger's (1977) work indicated otherwise. He determined the entire nucleotide sequence of a viral DNA molecule and mapped its, 5374 bases. Analysis of the DNA by Sanger's coworkers showed that at least four of the genes were overlapping.
This showed that an individual triplet might code for two different amino acids. In 1958 Sanger won the Nobel Prize in chemistry for his sequencing of the amino acids in insulin. In 1980 he shared a second Nobel Prize in chemistry for mapping the bases of the viral DNA
