Living things, from bacteria to humans, depend on a workforce of proteins to carry out essential tasks within their cells. Proteins are chains of amino acids that are strung together according to ...

How can just four nitrogenous bases--adenine, cytosine, guanine, and uracil--possibly code for all 20 amino acids? Thus, early researchers quickly determined that the smallest combination of As, Cs, ...

Genes are the building blocks of life, and the genetic code provides the instructions for the complex processes that make ...

The findings, which detail how amino acids shaped the genetic code of ancient microorganisms, shed light on the mystery of how life began on Earth. "You see the same amino acids in every organism, ...

Jun Tsuji, Robert Nydza, Erika Wolcott, Erin Mannor, Brad Moran, Grant Hesson, Tygue Arvidson, Kelly Howe, Rachel Hayes, Manuel Ramirez and Mike Way A number of genomes use genetic codes that are ...

Proteins are the workhorses that keep our cells running, and there are many thousands of types of proteins in our cells, each ...

With only rare exceptions, every organism constructs proteins from just 20 building blocks called amino acids. Recently, however, researchers modified Escherichia coli bacteria so that the ...

Humans possess six forms of the protein actin, which perform essential functions in the body. Two in particular, β-actin and γ-actin, are nearly identical, only differing by four amino acids. Yet ...

Membrane proteins play important roles in health and disease, but they are so hydrophobic that they require detergents to maintain their shape outside membranes. That makes them difficult to study.

To reveal the structural principles determining substrate specificity of 4-coumarate:CoA ligase (4CL), the crystal structure of the phenylalanine activation domain of gramicidin S synthetase was used ...