Roger Kornberg is the son of Arthur Kornberg who won the nobel prize
back in 1959 for DNA biosynthesis. Good genes run in families.
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Nobel winner saw how to read the code of life
By Maggie Fox, Health and Science CorrespondentWed Oct 4, 12:55 PM ET
If DNA is the blueprint for life, RNA is the builder that has to make
something out of it, and Nobel chemistry winner Roger Kornberg figured
out how this happens.
Kornberg made an image of a molecule that RNA uses to read and
transcribe the DNA code into something that actually works.
It took close to 20 years to find a way to first see and then understand
the molecule, known as RNA polymerase. Kornberg used a method called
X-ray crystallography to freeze the atoms, and image them as they moved,
step by step.
DNA is clearly important, Kornberg says. "But on its own, this
information is silent," he has said. "RNA polymerase gives it voice."
This copying process is called transcription, and it requires a
complicated physical structure that, like machines on a construction
site, shifts pieces around -- all at the atomic level.
"This is a machine with moving parts," Kornberg said in a statement
released by Stanford University, where he works, in 2000. His team uses
terms such as "jaws," "clamp" and "funnel" to describe the pieces.
The structure forms pincer-like jaws that trap the DNA near the gene to
be transcribed. A clamp then swings over the DNA and locks on.
"This is one of the most fundamental biological processes," said Dr.
Jeremy Berg, director of the National Institute of General Medical
Sciences, one of the U.S. National Institutes of Health, which helped
fund Kornberg's work.
"The DNA double helix is a very beautiful structure but it is a
challenge to deal with because all the information is inside," Berg
added in a telephone interview. "What RNA polymerase has to do is
somehow find the right spot and then pull the two strands of the double
helix apart in the right region.
"Then it uses RNA polymerase to make polymerase." Polymerase is an
enzyme that can cut apart these structures.
"It has to copy the sequence very accurately. It has to stop and start
in the right places. It has to turn on the right genes under the right
circumstances," Berg added.
All cells carry a full set of DNA code, but each cell must activate, or
express, different genes in order to do their specialized work. "So
muscle cells express different genes than brain cells do and the
assembly that does this is RNA polymerase," Berg said.
Kornberg's team set out to visualize this structure.
"When Roger Kornberg started working on it, it was so complicated, some
people thought he was somewhere between ambitious and crazy to try to
solve its structure," Berg said.
"He very steadily and methodically did the chemistry and tried to figure
out what the components were and tried to handle this delicate assembly
or set of assemblies."
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http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20061004/sc_nm/nobel_chemistry_rna_dc;_ylt=AjM
cUwvPV24Mm2mrnhYSfFwhANEA;_ylu=X3oDMTA5aHJvMDdwBHNlYwN5bmNhdA--
or
http://tinyurl.com/zyege
--
John Hachmann aa #1782
"Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities"
-Voltaire
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