by Roberto — "There are twenty amino acids that occur naturally in proteins. Considering the diversity of protein structures and function, do you think that is small or large?" Thus started my most recent musings on crafting a possible Talmudic question...
by Christoph — Worry not, this is no lengthy contemplation on the use of classical Latin in scientific language. It's a not-so-short piece to emphasize that it makes sense to mark the ends of non-branched polymers like DNA and RNA, and thereby define their chemical directionality. Bioinformaticians who routinely work with DNA and RNA in fasta...
by Christoph —When did you first hear about the "genetic code"? In high school? Or in college, in an undergraduate course in molecular biology and/or genetics? In either case you were certainly shown the famous codon table that specifies which of the 64 possible triplets in messenger RNA (mRNA) are translated into one of the 20 canonical...
by Christoph — If biology would have to rely solely on homology studies to understand HGT (as described in the first two parts of this series) even the most startling cases could be dismissed as just-so stories, as highly improbable 'accidents' in the past, or even as flaws of statistical analyses (for example faulty parameter settings). Fortunately, HGT can be...
by Christoph — The concept that bacteriophages are HGT agents is old hat, a 90-year-old hat to be precise. I mention just two well‑studied cases: the nasty symptoms of cholera and of bacillary dysentery in humans are triggered by toxins produced by the causative bacteria, Vibrio cholerae and Shigella dysenteriae, respectively. Yet in both cases the genes for toxin synthesis are...
by Christoph — When biochemists deciphered the genetic code in the 1960s (the triplet 'alphabet' for amino acids whose defined order make up the protein 'words' ) it was, and still is, the most compelling evidence for a common "descent with modifications" (Charles Darwin) of all life on Earth: the alphabet is the same in all life forms. This holds true...
