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Scientists from the Medical Research Council (MRC) Institute of Genetics and Molecular Medicine (IGMM) at the University of Edinburgh have discovered an enzyme that corrects the most common mistake in mammalian DNA.
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Researchers have imaged in unprecedented detail the three-dimensional structure of supercoiled DNA, revealing that its shape is much more dynamic than the well-known double helix.
Biochemistry
Oct 12, 2015
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Researchers from the University of Illinois at Chicago are the first to describe why CRISPR gene editing sometimes fails to work, and how the process can be made to be much more efficient.
Biotechnology
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Oncology & Cancer
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The American mathematician John Nash, who died in a taxi accident at the weekend, is probably best known to the wider public through Russell Crowe's portrayal of him in the 2001 movie A Beautiful Mind.
Mathematics
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(PhysOrg.com) -- CSIRO's Double Helix Science Club has produced a paper model of the International Space Station (ISS) - the first designed just for children.
Space Exploration
Mar 3, 2009
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In geometry a double helix (plural helices) typically consists of two congruent helices with the same axis, differing by a translation along the axis, which may or may not be half-way.
The term "double helix" is commonly encountered in molecular biology, where it refers to the structure of DNA. The double-helix model of DNA structure was first published in the journal Nature by James D. Watson and Francis Crick in 1953, based upon the crucial X-ray diffraction image of DNA (labeled as "Photo 51") from Rosalind Franklin in 1952 , followed by her more clarified DNA image with Raymond Gosling, Maurice Wilkins, Alexander Stokes and Herbert Wilson, as well as base-pairing chemical and biochemical information by Erwin Chargaff.
Crick, Wilkins and Watson each received one third of the 1962 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for their contributions to the discovery. (Franklin, whose breakthrough X-ray diffraction data was used to formulate the DNA structure, died in 1958, and thus was ineligible to be nominated for a Nobel Prize.)
The DNA double helix is a right-handed spiral polymer of nucleic acids, held together by nucleotides which base pair together. A single turn of the helix constitutes ten nucleotides. The double helix structure of DNA contains a major groove and minor groove, the major groove being wider than the minor groove. Given the difference in widths of the major groove and minor groove, many proteins which bind to DNA do so through the wider major groove .
The order, or sequence, of the nucleotides in the double helix within a gene specifies the primary structure of a protein.
The term entered popular culture with the publication in 1968 of The Double Helix: A Personal Account of the Discovery of the Structure of DNA, by James Watson.
This text uses material from Wikipedia, licensed under CC BY-SA
