Word: paramecium
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1980-1989
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...instructions for making proteins, the building blocks of life; variations 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...
...while studying the 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...