MOLECULAR BIOLOGY: Translation by Entrapment

Molecular biology by numbers … five

Watson and Crick are famous for the discovery of the double helix but there is a less widely known Ciba Symposium paper by Crick and Watson that puts forward a general theory of virus structure based on principles of assembly of subunits. Few people remember that Jim Watson came to Cambridge to work on the X-ray crystallography of tobacco mosaic virus; I suspect that had he not been distracted ...

Molecular biology by numbers …seven

did not find the ␣-helix because they had been wrongly advised about the structure of the peptide bond and they were looking for helical structures with an integral number of turns. Pauling knew that the peptide bond was planar from his theory of resonance and he did not let any Platonic preconceptions guide his model building. The ␣-helix has a 3½-residue turn and two turns for every seven ami...

Molecular biology by numbers … four

The tetrahedron has four triangular faces and, because the threefold axes of symmetry also pass through the four vertices, it is the dual of itself. We know it best as a description of how the four bonds of the carbon atom are disposed in space. I was once told by a theoretical physicist that the values of the fundamental physical constants need not have been the same during the evolution of th...

Molecular biology by numbers ..... three

Molecular biology by numbers…six

Flies usually have six legs, but mutations in the Antennapedia locus can convert the sensory antennae into legs, so they can have as many as eight legs. For many years I tried to find out whether these were smelling legs or walking antennae, but I never succeeded in getting any reply from the professionals other than that the bristle pattern had changed and that was all that was important. In f...