Word: globularity
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Dates: during 2000-2000
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...worm or man--often share structural characteristics that are reflected in the genes that encode them. Structural biologist Stephen Burley of Rockefeller University estimates that the maximum number of distinct shapes may be as few as 5,000. The NIGMS hopes to construct a lexicon of shapes--barrels, doughnuts, globular spheres, molecular zippers and so on--that when mixed and matched will spell the shape of any gene's product. About 1,000 of these structures--and the genes that code for them--have already been cataloged...
...million years ago, for example, our predecessors had brains barely half as large as ours today. So it would seem to follow that in another couple of million years, our brains will be twice again as large, housed in the huge globular heads familiar from innumerable sci-fi images. Conversely, our immediate forebears were robustly boned and, we think, more heavily muscled than we are today. What could be more natural than to conclude that supported by increasingly complex labor-saving technologies, our bodies will in future be frailer and shorn of such frivolities as the little...