There are 20 amino acids that make up proteins and all have the same basic structure, differing only in the R-group or side chain they have. Amino acids are in an equilibrium between two acids with ...

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, ...

The genetic code is the recipe for life, and provides the instructions for how to make proteins, generally using just 20 ...

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, ...

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.

Researchers say they have created the first ever animal with artificial information in its genetic code. The technique, they say, could give biologists "atom-by-atom control" over the molecules in ...

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 ...

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 ...

The genetic code is a set of rules defining how the four-letter code of DNA is translated into the 20-letter code of amino acids, which are the building blocks of proteins. The genetic code is a set ...