Textbooks brace for nuclear challenge
New data threaten to shake up 30 years of scientific dogma regarding how a cell carries out one of its most basic tasks: the translation of the genetic code into proteins.
According to a study appearing in an upcoming Science, the cell’s nucleus takes part in the task of manufacturing proteins. To date, researchers have thought that that process takes place only outside the nucleus, in the cytoplasm.
“It’s certainly an unexpected finding, if true,” says Joseph G. Gall of the Carnegie Institution of Washington in Baltimore.