THE stuff of life comes wrapped in tiny bags called cells. Inside are DNA molecules that carry the instructions for how to run the cell, to make it grow, and to cause it, ultimately, to divide into two cells, if that is to be its fate. Messages made of a slightly different molecule, RNA, carry these instructions to molecular machines called ri-bosomes. A ribosome's job is to read the RNA messages and translate them into proteins, the workhorse molecules of cells. Those proteins then supervise and execute the running, the growing and the dividing.
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