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Many ribosomes act simultaneously along the mRNA, forming superstructures called polysomes.

If the polymer chain assumes a helicoidal conformation in the crystalline state, and if it does not contain asymmetric carbon atoms, it can be expected that either helices of the same sense, or, in equal ratio, helices of opposite sense are represented in the lattice.

We are sometimes asked what the result would be if we put four +'s in one gene. To answer this my colleagues have recently put together not merely four but six +'s.

It now seems very likely that many of the 64 triplets, possibly most of them, may code one amino acid or another, and that in general several distinct triplets may code one amino acid.

The meaning of this observation is unclear, but it raises the unfortunate possibility of ambiguous triplets; that is, triplets which may code more than one amino acid. However one would certainly expect such triplets to be in a minority.

The strands of the DNA double helix are held together by hydrogen bonding interactions between the complementary base pairs. Heating DNA in solution easily breaks these hydrogen bonds, allowing the two strands to separate - a process called denaturation or melting.

All vinyl polymers may be regarded as built from monomeric units containing a tertiary carbon atom.

Unfortunately it makes the unambiguous determination of triplets by these methods much more difficult than would be the case if there were only one triplet for each amino acid.

After some minor pieces of theoretical study that I worked on, a student in my statistical mechanics class brought to my attention a problem in polyelectrolytes.

During the decade following the discovery of the double-helical structure of DNA, the problem of translation - namely, how genetic information is used to synthesize proteins - was a central topic in molecular biology.