The biokit: Journey through molecular biology (original) (raw)

Immunology Today, 1984

Abstract

If you know Asterix the Gaul, the strip cartoon hero of epic children's fiction, you will immediately he at ease with 'Protix ' (a simple protein molecule), the hero and narrator of this epic Journey Through Molecular Biology. The author, Jo~l de Rosnay, has made a brave and exciting attempt to put across the basics of molecular biology to an audience unschooled in the biochemical revolution of the past twenty years. To a large extent he succeeds in livening up the classical DNA-RNA-prote in central dogma in a form attractive to both the uninitiated and the sadly switched-off. He does this by means of some delightfully childish illustrations, by Puig Rosado, and a racy strip cartoon patter from the hero, with a more straightforward text to back it up. This text is simple, clear and not unnecessarily colloquial though it does thicken as the book progresses. Like Asterix, who is given his great strength by a secret potion, Protix (an animated green globular character with a grin) clearly has great strength in getting the message across. The author 's inebriation with the new wine of molecular biology is clear; he is enthusiastic that all the heavy biochemistry should come alive easily in the reader 's imagination. As one who has taught such pre-University biochemistry as is needed by students to have some inkling of what the revolution holds for us all, I found the book enthralling. An excellent introduction deals with the conceptual barriers of size and scale. Protix points out that were you magnified a million times and then laid your height of 1 700 km, from Athens to Paris, he would be, on that scale, barely a centimetre long, whilst a liver cell would be the size of a bus. This is followed by the essentials of protein construction and the inheren t infinite variability thereof. A simple analogy here is with the construction of a model railway line, the different track length units and different curved units being equivalent to amino acids, building up to make the precise (protein) conformations of the desired railway track. DNA structure and behaviour is simple and freshly covered. Some delightful cartoon replication enzyme characters appear, to scale, on an unzipping DNA molecule, uncoiling and linking the new strands in a figurative manner that one would not dare to put in a normal student text. Transcription was rather weakly explained, both as a word and as a process, and no reasons are given for the introduction of 'cheaper ' uracil and ribose at this juncture in the story. The diagrams for ' translation' are accurately scaled and reflect the good design of the accompanying 'biokit ' . The 'DNA Story' ends with a potted history of discovery, from Mendel (1860) to I takura and Leroy Hood (1981), but sadly Miescher (who discovered the wretched stuff) gets left out. The second half, of this joyously brief work, explains the mechanism of the 'biokit ' itself, a neat and ingenious collection of printed cardboard assembly bits (mRNA, tRNA, amino acids, ribosomes, etc.) that perform the coded synthesis as it has been cartooned. They are packaged, unassembled but punched out, in an envelope inside the back cover. Educationally and conceptually this has good reinforcement value. The genetic code itself is on a dial wheel with three little windows for the base triplet codon, or tRNA anti-codon, appropriate to each desired amino acid. In practice, I found my imagination of ribosomal working better than the fumblings of my fingers, but to the uninitiated or unimaginative the 'bioklt ' model will help. It took me ten minutes with the full model to transcribe the code for the brain peptide endorphin and translate it on the cardboard ribosome into the five interlocking amino acids of the molecule. (Here one needs adhesive tape in the role ofpeptidyl transferase.) It is nice to know that my brain cells can make the real thing in less than half a second! 367

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