Word: nucleic
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Sucked In, Sealed Off. Especially important among the cells' inflammatory chemicals are enzymes, the organic catalysts that mediate reactions between other body substances and, in some cases, destroy them. Perhaps the most potent are the acid hydrolases, some of which dissolve proteins and nucleic acids. Where they were kept was a mystery until 1955, when Dr. Christian de Duve at the Catholic University of Louvain deduced from their behavior that they must be stored in some particles inside the cells. Though nobody had yet seen the particles, he named them lysosomes (dissolving bodies...
Usually, that is good; the harmless debris may be either left in the cell or expelled from it. But in the case of some viruses, the effect may be to bare the virus particle's nucleic acid and leave it free to infect the cell. Moreover, as New York University's Dr. Gerald Weissmann reported in Michigan, some virus particles can survive a spell in a digestive sac, and emerge from it with their infective powers intact. By another mechanism, lysosomes can be directly harmful: they may, for reasons not yet guessed at, attack part of their...
...viruses escape, he can get the evidence to convict them because they leave biochemical fingerprints. In hamster tumors that he provoked with a known virus, Dr. Green told an American Cancer Society seminar, he found large amounts of an abnormal, new form of RNA, one of the two principal nucleic acids. Now he is looking for similar fingerprints in human cancers...
...process of protein synthesis, information is transferred from DNA, a linear sequence of nucleotides, to messenger-DNA another type of nucleic acid. The messenger is then "read" and amino acids corresponding to the "words," or codens are joined together end-to-end in a long chain to form a protein...
...Streeters have been skeptical of the firm's future once the pill boom lags. But only about 20% of the U.S. women who could use the pills now do so, and most of the overseas market has barely been tapped. Moreover, Syntex's research in hormones and nucleic acids is right where major new-drug discoveries are most likely to come. Even now, Syntex is benefiting from its research. Its earnings in the latest quarter jumped 236% (to $5.9 million) and sales climbed 125% (to $15.1 million) from a year earlier. Syntex expects sales in its current fiscal...