Word: keratin
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Growing hair, for example, is a trait that evolved only in mammals. One of the key proteins in our hair is known as alpha-keratin. Not long ago, some Austrian and Italian researchers decided to search for alpha-keratin genes in animals that lack hair. They found those genes in chickens and lizards - which belong to the closest living lineages to mammals. Lizards build alpha-keratin in their claws. And it turns out that mammals do as well. The research suggests that the hairless ancestors of today's mammals already had alpha-keratin that was used to build their claws...
...colds and cancer. But at mid-century he was the world's premier physical chemist, the man who had literally written the book on chemical bonds. A few months before Watson arrived, in fact, Pauling embarrassed the Cavendish by winning the race to figure out the structure of keratin, the protein that makes up hair and fingernails. (It was a long, complex corkscrew of atoms known as the alpha-helix.) While he did rely on X-ray crystallographs for hints to what was going on at the molecular level, Pauling depended more heavily on scaled-up models he built...
APRIL Linus Pauling deciphers the molecular structure of the protein keratin...