Rap GTP-binding Protein

This was an extraordinary insight, but one so far in advance of the dayБЂ™s scientific requirements that it attracted no attention at all. For most of the next half century the common assumption was that the material-now called deoxyribonucleic acid, or DNA-had at most a subsidiary role in matters of heredity. It was too simple. It had just four basic components, called nucleotides, which was like having an alphabet of just four letters. How could you possibly write the story of life with such a rudimentary alphabet? (The answer is that you do it in much the way that you create complex messages with the simple dots and dashes of Morse code-by combining them.) DNA didnБЂ™t do anything at all, as far as anyone could tell. It just sat there in the nucleus, possibly binding the chromosome in some way or adding a splash of acidity on command or fulfilling some other trivial task that no one had yet thought of. The necessary complexity, it was thought, had to exist in proteins in the nucleus. There were, however, two problems with dismissing DNA ...»