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Nature Chemical Biology 3, 19–20 (1 January 2007) | doi:10.1038/nchembio0107-19

Are we there yet?

William C Merrick

Since the 1960s and the breaking of the genetic code, the key question in protein biosynthesis has been “how does the ribosome work?” From that time point until the late 1990s, the primary attack on “how it works” was the biochemistry of the translation factors that are required for the three discrete steps of protein biosynthesis: initiation, elongation and termination. In the last ten years, remarkable advances have been made in the areas of ribosome crystallographyand cryoelectron microscopy such that now it is possible to obtain at medium or high resolution not only the structure of the ribosome, but also the structure of the ribosome with the key bound components, mRNA and tRNA.