Issue 256 / March 2023
In The Beginning
It is one of the many mysteries of our existence. How does life begin? What gives the first nudge? Is there, for that matter, a primordial poke? Over the millennia, scholars have tried to define the actual notion of life as a whole - which may seem obvious to some, but just sit down for a while and give it a thought. How are creatures made? How do they begin? What, for instance, goes on inside a womb? Theories varied according to the knowledge of the times, and explanations shifted from the near mystical to the anatomical, closely followed by the cellular until the 1980s, when - thanks to the rise of novel technologies - researchers could consider embryology at the level of the molecular. Though we are still really asking the same questions, what we know about the making of life has been dramatically fine-tuned and we now delve into the minute, wondering which molecules drive cells to become one part of an organism or another. What factors kickstart the process of a cell's fate? Today, we have part of the answer: the tetra-peptide repeat homeobox proteins. Transcription factors without which the very first embryonic cell divisions would not occur.
 |
Protein Spotlight (ISSN 1424-4721) is a monthly review written by the
Swiss-Prot team of the SIB Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics.
Spotlight articles describe a specific protein or family of proteins on an informal tone. |