During his graduate studies, Arber assisted biophysicists at Geneva in developing high-level magnification techniques in electron microscopy to study bacteriophages. He completed his dissertation on deficiencies of a mutant strain of bacteriophage lambda and received his Ph.D. in 1958. Arber then went to the University of Southern California for further study and to refine his laboratory techniques in genetics and bacteriophage research. While in the United States, Arber also took the opportunity to visit several colleagues who were studying bacteriophages.
Arber returned to Switzerland to join the faculty at the University of Geneva in 1960. With support from the Swiss National Science Foundation, he embarked on studies of the molecular basis of bacteriophage restriction. Working with one of his graduate students, Daisy Dussoix, Arber found in 1962 that restriction was host-controlled and involved changes in the phage's DNA. In effect, the DNA of the invading phages is cut into component parts, although some phages survived the operation. This discovery set in motion a series of studies that jump-started genetics to become the new frontier in biomedical research.
Arber himself formulated a hypothesis presupposing that an endonuclease enzyme in the host severs the DNA of invading phages into component parts, while a methylase enzyme modifies the DNA of the host to make it invulnerable to its own endonuclease enzyme.
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