Word: molecular
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...acts as a sort of coded instruction manual -- tell different cells what their duties are within an organism. Armed with such specific knowledge, researchers may someday understand exactly why these instructions are occasionally garbled and, perhaps, why cancer and other gene-influenced diseases occur. Predicts Stephen Howell, a plant molecular biologist and a member of the research team: "The scientific community will be able to exploit this tool for as many purposes as one can imagine...
...rather oblique direction. UCSD Biochemist Marlene DeLuca has been investigating for 20 years how the firefly protein -- in this case, an enzyme called luciferase -- produces light. But the process of collecting and grinding up fireflies to extract the enzyme was laborious and costly. She and Donald Helinski, a molecular geneticist, decided to isolate the luciferase gene, cloning exact copies of it and splicing it into the genetic machinery of the common bacterium E. coli. The E. coli could then massproduce luciferase by the vat. DeLuca and Helinski accomplished this task by using standard recombinant DNA techniques developed over the past...
...their malevolence and mischief, viruses may have played an important, perhaps crucial, role in evolution. And now, as recombinant DNA technology advances, molecular biologists are engineering viruses that may ! soon benefit rather than devastate humans...
...invention of the electron microscope -- for which German Physicist Ernst Ruska finally won the Nobel Prize this year -- broke the light barrier. The new instrument -- along with a technique called X-ray crystallography (in which X rays are diffracted through crystallized virus particles to reveal their molecular structure) -- at last provided a view of the bizarre and startling world of the tiny creatures...
...late 1950s Herschbach proposed to study what happens to individual molecules in the trillionth of a second of a chemical reaction by using the crossed molecular beam technique. Colleagues thought he was crazy, but this novel approach proved to be useful -- especially in the following years, when Lee made improvements that substantially increased the variety of reactions that could be studied this way. The method is analogous to that of particle physicists, who accelerate beams of speeding subatomic particles, smash them together or into a target, and then study the resulting debris. Herschbach's and Lee's beams consist...