Word: amino
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...shaped like a spiral staircase. Each step in the staircase is composed of a compatible pair of four different nucleotides, rep- resented by the letters A, T, G and C. Grouped into sets of three steps, the nucleotides are called codons, which dictate, or code for, the 20 amino acids, the subunits of protein. A few codons, or code words, serve as punctuation marks, telling the cellular machinery to start or stop adding amino acids to the growing protein chain...
...membrane of Paramecium that Biologist John Preer Jr. and his colleagues at Indiana University in Bloomington stumbled onto the aberrant code. In the midst of the long sequences of Paramecium codons, they kept finding words that in most creatures read "stop." Yet in Paramecium, the word added another amino acid. Says Preer: "We thought it must be an error in our technique." However, news soon filtered over from the Centre de Genetique Moleculaire laboratory near Paris that scientists there were encountering the same anomaly. As the two groups report in a recent issue of the British journal Na- ture, additional...
...thin tome lays out the creationist views in the form of stories a father beetle tells his son Bomby about the ways of the bombardier family. The text is peppered with scientific terms like amino acids and catalase, but it is so riddled with errors that entomologists cannot begin to guess where Rue got her information. (For example, the beetles do not spray their eggs with tear gas for protection, as the author maintains.) Biologist Thomas Eisner of Cornell University, one of the world's leading bombardier experts, says of the book, "I've never seen anything like...
Wald said that once during a conversation with Albert Einstein, the great physicist suddenly piped, "Why do you think all the natural amino acids are lefthanded.... You know, I always wondered why the electron came out negative; it must have won the fight...
Other scientists in the meantime have ade a number of advances in understanding the protein's functions. Most commonly, the protein within a cell adds a phosphorous atom to another protein known as amino acid tyrosine. This seemingly minor action, however, has intriguing effects on living tissues and is somehow related to normal growth in skin cells...