Clyde A. Hutchison III is an American biochemist and microbiologist notable for his research on site-directed mutagenesis and synthetic biology.
Hutchison participated in the determination of the first complete sequence of a DNA molecule (ΦX174) when he spent a year sabbatical at the Frederick Sanger's laboratory in 1975/1976.
[3] In 1971, Clyde Hutchison and Marshall Edgell showed that it is possible to produce mutants with small fragments of bacteriophage ΦX174 and restriction nucleases.
[4][5] Hutchison later collaborated with Michael Smith and developed a more general method of site-directed mutagenesis using a mutant oligonucleotide primer and DNA polymerase.
The polymerization with the primer annealed to the template generated a double-stranded DNA product that contained a mutation and could be converted to a closed circular duplex by enzymatic ligation.
For his part in the development of this process, Michael Smith later shared the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1993 with Kary B. Mullis, who invented polymerase chain reaction.