Abstract
Every era in biological and chemical sciences has had a current state of the art philosophy. Early in the century, it was sufficient to describe an extract with interesting properties. Soon, however, science required increasing levels of purification starting with simple precipitation methods and ranging through sophisticated chromatography and HPLC. Thus, in modern times, it is rare to see a biochemical paper that does not boast of having achieved a “single band” on gel electrophoresis. With the advent of protein and nucleic acid sequencing methods a number of sequence data banks were established so that various comparisons of proteins and nucleic acids were available. Now we have the structural era, where the most crucial information is the 3-dimensional structure of the key protein or nucleic acid. The data bases of structures are expanding rapidly as X-ray and NMR developing technologies allow structural analysis of more and more proteins, nucleic acids and their complexes. Recently, complex structures have involved various ribonucleic acid molecules.
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© 1999 Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht
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Barciszewski, J., Clark, B.F.C. (1999). Why RNA?. In: Barciszewski, J., Clark, B.F.C. (eds) RNA Biochemistry and Biotechnology. NATO Science Series, vol 70. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-011-4485-8_1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-011-4485-8_1
Publisher Name: Springer, Dordrecht
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