The trio of scientists won the 2013 Nobel Prize for this work on the intracellular trafficking of proteins). At almost each point in their journey, some of the proteins are modified: they can be clipped short, chemically modified by the addition of a sugar, or twirled around and bound to another protein (the signals to make these modifications are typically contained in the sequence of the protein itself). The whole process can be imagined as an elaborate postal system. It begins with the linguistic code of genes (RNA) that is translated to write the letter (the protein). The protein is
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