Concepedia

Abstract

The enormous complexity of ribosome structure even in simple organisms such as bacteria has become fully evident during the last few years. Most of the detailed information on the chemical aspects of ribosomal proteins has been obtained from the 30 S ribosome of Escherichia coli (Traut et al., 1967; Moore et al., 1968; Fogel and Sypherd, 1968; Delius and Traut, 1969; Traut et al., this volume; Kurland et al., this volume). The functional aspects and how they relate to the structural complexity of the 30 S ribosome have been studied to a most remarkable degree of detail in Nomura's laboratory (this volume and Traub et al., 1967, 1968b, 1969; Ozaki et al., 1969). Although some protein components are of particular importance for specific functions of the 30 S ribosome (chain initiation, codon specific aminoacyl-transfer RNA (tRNA) binding, fidelity of coding) it is quite clear that the functions of many proteins...