Reflections on 20 years of RNA
- Department of Chemistry, Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, Maryland 21218, USA
- Corresponding author: draper{at}jhu.edu
This extract was created in the absence of an abstract.
My introduction to the RNA world started approximately 20 years before the 1994 founding of this journal; a few remarks on how I happened to take up RNA as a research theme during that time will serve as background to the excitement and promise for RNA studies that I sensed ca. 1994. As an undergraduate biochemistry major I had enjoyed enzymology and became intrigued by the ribosome, but thought its functions too complex to dissect with the tools then available and looked for something more approachable to study. In graduate school, I chose for my first student journal club presentation two papers that had just appeared in Biochemistry (1972), the now classic work on tRNA folding from Crothers’s lab. Every student of RNA folding should read (and re-read) them and the papers that followed through 1976, as they outlined major themes still present in the RNA folding field: hierarchical folding …
