Word: mycoplasmas
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...Outbreaks of Mycoplasma pneumoniae, a bacteria that causes a particularly virulent respiratory illness, have struck New York, Ohio and Texas. The cold- like bug could spread rapidly as winter approaches...
...dogs for hair, ticks, fleas and fecal matter. "We've excluded the usual bacterial, fungal and parasitic infections," says Dr. Ron Voorhees, a New Mexico state epidemiologist. Ruled out are anthrax, plague and Legionnaires' disease, as well as insecticides and other toxins. Two bacteria are among the suspects: Mycoplasma fermentans and Chlamydia pneumoniae, both of which can cause fatal lung inflammations. But topping the list of possible culprits is a virus...
...accountant's son who excelled in Greek and Latin in college during the German occupation, Montagnier is no stranger to adversity. He faced it again in 1990, when he supported a controversial theory that mycoplasma, a bacterium-like organism, is the trigger that turns a slow-growing population of AIDS viruses into mass killers. According to Montagnier, the explosion of sexual activity in the U.S. during the 1970s fostered the spread of a hardy, drug-resistant strain of mycoplasma. HIV, meanwhile, lay dormant in Africa. The AIDS epidemic began, Montagnier speculates, when the two microbes got together, perhaps in Haiti...
...among organisms were thought to involve only the number and type of proteins that are strung together. Now researchers in the U.S., Europe and Japan have found species + that defy certain words in the genetic scripture: in the familiar Paramecium, a single-celled protozoan, and in a bacterium called Mycoplasma capricolum, the DNA patterns responsible for protein construction exhibit a surprising difference. Not only does the discovery undermine the "universality" of the genetic code, but it may cause scientists to rethink certain theories about evolution...
...Paramecium's cellular machinery read either of two "periods" (TAG and TAA) in the standard code, it linked the amino acid glutamine onto the protein chain rather than stopping production; it obeyed only the third word for stop, TGA. At Nagoya University in Japan, scientists have found that Mycoplasma also ignores a stop triplet. But in this case it is TGA that is translated into an amino acid, tryptophan, while the other two codons are read as stop. "Within a certain sphere," says Biologist Syozo Osawa, "it seems that change is possible...