Word: amino
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...headed by Dr. Leslie Iverson, 36, of the British Medical Research Council's Division of Neurochemical Pharmacology, has been studying the chemical changes in brains of Huntington's victims. The team has found that victims of the disease have lower-than-normal quantities of the transmitter gamma amino butyric acid (GABA) and occasionally-elevated amounts of dopamine. They are now trying to develop drugs that will restore the balance between these chemicals...
...into space. He speculates that those clouds may consist of rust-red organic compounds floating in a thick atmosphere of hydrogen, methane and ammonia coughed up by volcanic eruptions. Exposed to the sun's radiation, the gases could form into complex organic compounds, including sugars, purines and even amino acids. Such a mix of ingredients is akin to the primordial "soup" that is believed to have given rise to the first life on earth...
...chemistry prize, also worth $98,100, went to Christian Anfinsen, 56, of the National Institutes of Health, and Rockefeller University's Stanford Moore, 59, and William H. Stein, 61, for their work on enzymes. Made up of long, folded chains of amino acids, these proteins are essential intermediaries, or catalysts, in the body's vital chemical reactions. Anfinsen showed how the three-dimensional shape of an enzyme-critical to its role in those reactions-is dictated by the order in which its amino acids occur. Moore and Stein, studying the same enzyme-ribonuclease -ingeniously unraveled its sequence...
Assuming that antibodies, like most other proteins, are composed of chains of amino acids, Edelman set out to identify the arrangement and composition of the antibody molecules. In 1969, he completed a gamma-globulin model showing the molecule to be made up of 19,996 atoms grouped together in amino-acid building blocks. His findings coincided with those of Porter, showing that the antibody molecule is composed of a double pair of chains, two "light" ones forming the branches of the Y, and two "heavy" ones that make up the trunk. After establishing that antibodies have some flexible amino-acid...
...check his theory, Bada dated a number of objects, including an ancient hominid bone dug up from East Africa's Olduvai Gorge by Anthropologist Louis S.B. Leakey. Its age, based on amino-acid dating, turned out to be 135,000 years-almost exactly the same as that deduced by Leakey from indirect geological evidence. Bada is still incredulous over the seemingly accurate results obtained by using his new clock. "It was so obvious and simple," he says, "I was just amazed that it hadn't been discovered before...