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Khorana, Har Gobind

(Encyclopedia)Khorana, Har Gobind, 1922–2011, American biochemist, b. Raipur (now in Pakistan), Ph.D. Univ. of Liverpool, 1948. He became a U.S. citizen in 1966, and was a professor at the Massachusetts Institute...

uracil

(Encyclopedia)uracil yo͝orˈəsĭl [key], organic base of the pyrimidine family. It was isolated from herring sperm and also produced in a laboratory in 1900–1901. When combined with the sugar ribose in a glycos...

differentiation

(Encyclopedia)differentiation, in biology, series of changes that occur in cells and tissues during development, resulting in their specialization. This, in turn, permits a greater variety of organisms. In plants, ...

Nirenberg, Marshall Warren

(Encyclopedia)Nirenberg, Marshall Warren, 1927–2010, American biochemist, b. Brooklyn, N.Y., Ph.D., Univ. of Michigan, 1947. He spent his entire career as a researcher at the National Institutes of Health. Nirenb...

leucine

(Encyclopedia)CE5 leucine lo͞oˈsēn [key], organic compund, one of the 20 amino acids commonly found in animal proteins. Only the l-stereooisomer appears in mammalian protein. It is one of several essential am...

biotechnology

(Encyclopedia)biotechnology, the use of biological processes, as through the exploitation and manipulation of living organisms or biological systems, in the development or manufacture of a product or in the technol...

Franklin, Rosalind Elsie

(Encyclopedia)Franklin, Rosalind Elsie, 1920–58, English molecular biologist and chemist, grad. Newnham College, Cambridge (1941). She spent most of the war years (1942–45) working for the British Coal Utilisat...

Yonath, Ada E.

(Encyclopedia)Yonath, Ada E., 1939–, Israeli crystallographer, Ph.D. Weizmann Institute of Science, Rehovat, Israel, 1968. Yonath has been a researcher and professor at the Weizmann Institute since 1970. She was ...

antiviral drug

(Encyclopedia)antiviral drug, any of several drugs used to treat viral infections. The drugs act by interfering with a virus's ability to enter a host cell and replicate itself with the host cell's DNA. Some drugs ...

codon

(Encyclopedia)codon: see nucleic acid.