Examples

We not only wanted to know what the amino acid sequence of an enzyme such as ribonuclease was, but we tried to find out as much as we could about what made it an enzyme and after we had taken that particular enzyme about as far as we thought we could profitably go, we turned to a number of others which have been listed in the Nobel Lecture.

Anfinsen had shown, with the enzyme ribonuclease, that the information for a protein assuming a specific three-dimensional structure is inherent in its amino-acid sequence, and this discovery was the starting point for studies of the mechanism of protein folding, one of the major areas of present-day biochemical research.

Moore and Stein had determined the amino-acid sequence of ribonuclease, but they received the prize for discovering anomalous properties of functional groups in the enzyme's active site, which is a result of the protein fold.

Cohn and her lab had access to some of the finest machinery and expertise in magnetic resonance, and over the next two decades she used these tools to look at numerous enzyme-substrate complexes like creatine kinase, pyruvate kinase, and ribonuclease, just to name a few.