This Special Issue of Development and Psychopathology is devoted to the legacy of Nicki R. Crick. At the time of her passing on October 28, 2012, Nicki was a Distinguished McKnight Professor and Irving B. Harris Professor of Child Psychology at the Institute of Child Development, University of Minnesota. Crick served as the director of the Institute of Child Development from January 2005 to Jun...

Present day data allow significant reconsideration of ideas on mechanisms underlying the degeneracy in the genetic code. Here a hypothesis is presented which links the degeneracy to possible conformational alterations in the codon-anticodon duplex. This enables explanation of Rumer symmetry in the table of the genetic code, coding of methionine and tryptophane without degeneracy and even predic...

Richard Dawkins has written another book on evolution. I haven't read it, but I noticed that one reviewer thought that the force of Dawkins' arguments was becoming diluted by a combination of militant atheism and over-flamboyant prose. To conservative scientists like me, the idea of selfish genes, while certainly snappy, leads to ignoring the biology surrounding the genes and, in the end, to a ...

The year 2016 marks the centenary of the birth of Francis Crick (1916-2004), who made outstanding contributions to genetics and neuroscience. In 1953, in a collaborative study, Francis Crick and James Watson discovered the DNA double helix, and in 1962 they and Maurice Wilkins were awarded the Noble Prize in Physiology or Medicine. Crick subsequently became very interested in neuroscience, part...

It has often been asserted that the discovery of the structure of DNA in 1953 was the starting point for molecular biology. Whether or not this is true, it cannot be doubted that Francis Crick became a dominant figure in the early years of molecular biology. In those years there was a continual interaction between theory and experiment, in which Crick paid a leading role. I was in Cambridge at ...

we have evaluated the nmr shielding tensors for a:t,g:c,a:u in watson-crick, and u-quartet. we have computed nmr shielding tensors at b31yp level by using 6-31g(d) basis set. we have compute anisotropy and asymmetry in a:t,g:c,a:u and u-quartet. the nmr shielding tensors were calculated using the giao method. the natural bonding orbital analysis (nbo) were performed. nbo calculation have been ...

D0L systems constitute the simplest and most widely studied type of Lindenmayer systems. They have the remarkable property of generating their language as a (word) sequence and, consequently, are very suitable for modeling growth properties. In this paper a new type of D0L systems is introduced, where the parallelism presented in L systems is combined with the paradigm of (Watson-Crick) complem...

Propargyl groups are attractive functional groups for labeling purposes, as they allow CuAAC-mediated bioconjugation. Their size minimally exceeds that of a methyl group, the latter being frequent in natural nucleotide modifications. To understand under which circumstances propargyl-containing oligodeoxynucleotides preserve base pairing, we focused on the exocyclic amine of cytidine. Residues a...