New Modalities in Oncology: Ribozymes

Abstract

F or years, one of the assumptions of cell biology was that all enzymatic actions were performed by proteins. Although nucleic acids (DNA and RNA) could serve as blueprints for the transcription and translation that would produce the proper amino acid sequences to make up an enzy-matic protein, it was the protein that did the actual work. However, in 1986, Zaug and Cech found that processing of RNA from the unicellular organism Tetrahymena thermophilia clearly depended upon an