Without this ancient three-dimensional fold of protein material, DNA could not organize into chromosomes, and life as we know it would not exist.
Amino acids are the building blocks of all proteins.
In nature, there are many types of histones, and when they are compared to each other they appear diverse. As the Hopkins scientists found, however, each histone contains the histone fold, but its location varies from histone to histone. When the histones are lined up by their histone-fold regions, they appear strikingly similar. The findings are being reported in the Nov. 21 issue of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The scientific paper is written by Gina Arents, a research associate in the Johns Hopkins Biology Department , and Evangelos Moudrianakis , a Hopkins biology professor.