🔬 Science · The Hindu
New discovery comes ‘close’ to challenging biology’s central dogma - The Hindu
From The Hindu via USVI News: The discovery of a protein that can, by itself, dictate the sequence of nucleic acids has caused a stir in the scientific community. Commentaries accompanying the work have highlighted the unusual nature of the finding and its implications for one of the foundational.
The field of molecular biology began when scientists attempted to answer a simple question: what molecule makes up the genetic material of an organism?
In the early 1900s, when the field was still in its infancy, there were two plausible candidates: nucleic acids (DNA and RNA) and proteins. At the time, proteins were the preferred candidates thanks to their diverse building blocks. All proteins (on the earth) are made up of some combination of 20 amino acids. Nucleic acids on the other hand were made up of just four nucleotides, leading to fewer molecular combinations than scientists believed were necessary for the carriers of heredity.
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