mRNA
jhalper | March 11, 2012A somewhat accidental discovery and random meetings between proteins in a cell: These are the subjects of two new online articles. Each, it its way, involves a technological advance that will, in turn, lead to further scientific discovery.
The first involves a partnership between a physics group and a cancer-research group. Among other things, such collaboration is essential for dealing with large data sets - multiple gene expression patterns, for example. When the team made their discovery, they were looking not just at gene expression, but at pieces of genes. More precisely, they were…
edyong | January 8, 2009
Living things, from bacteria to humans, depend on a workforce of proteins to carry out essential tasks within their cells. Proteins are chains of amino acids that are strung together according to instructions encoded within that most important of molecules - DNA.
The string of "letters" that make up DNA correspond to chains of amino acids, and they are read in threes, with every combination representing one of many amino acids. Until now, scientists believed that this relationship is unambiguous - within any single genome, every three-letter combination maps to one and only one amino acid.…