The clearest picture yet of our “last universal common ancestor” suggests it was a relatively complex organism living 4.2 billion years ago, a time long considered too harsh for life to flourish. If ...

Zachary Burton, Ph.D., Professor Emeritus, Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology, Michigan State University, reports on tRNA (transfer RNA) as a written molecular history of the pre-life to ...

Amino acid sequences of proteins are encoded in nucleic acids composed of four letters, A, G, C, and T(U). However, this four-letter alphabet coding system limits further functionalities of proteins ...

Cells use a genetic code to translate the information contained in DNA and RNA sequences into the amino-acid building blocks that make up a protein (Nirenberg et al., 1965; Söll et al., 1965). DNA ...

1 Germplasm Bank of Wild Species, Kunming Institute of Botany, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Kunming, Yunnan, China 2 Institute of Molecular and Cellular Biology, National Tsing Hua University, Hsinchu ...

Translation using four-base codons occurs in both natural and synthetic systems. What constraints contributed to the universal adoption of a triplet codon, rather than quadruplet codon, genetic code?

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ABSTRACT: X-ray structures of transfer RNAs (tRNAs) bound to the whole ribosome do not fully explain the mechanism of translation. The cause of the failure seems to come mainly from a high Mg2+ ion ...

ABSTRACT: Nature has developed codon as a tool to manipulate a two-electron spin symmetry (short-living electrons, forming a radical pair, arise from the Mg-bound nucleosidetriphosphate cleavage at ...

The La protein binds the 3′ ends of many newly synthesized noncoding RNAs, protecting these RNAs from nucleases and influencing folding, maturation, and ribonucleoprotein assembly. Although 3′ end ...