Katsura I
Nature. 1987;327(6117):73-5. doi: 10.1038/327073a0.
How the size and shape of living structures are determined by genetic information is one of the fundamental problems in biology. Here I describe a study in which the size of a biological supramolecular structure was changed in a predictable way by in vitro genetics, with the size both before and after manipulation being exactly determined. I have studied the tail of bacteriophage lambda, whose length is determined by the length of the 'ruler protein', the product of gene H. The length of the tail can be decreased or increased by deleting the middle part of gene H or by forming a small duplication there, and the length of the tail is proportional to the size of the protein. These results can be regarded as a special case of protein engineering, namely supramolecular protein engineering.
生物结构的大小和形状如何由遗传信息决定是生物学中的基本问题之一。在此，我描述一项研究，其中通过体外遗传学以可预测的方式改变了生物超分子结构的大小，操作前后的大小都得到了精确测定。我研究了λ噬菌体的尾部，其长度由基因H的产物“尺子蛋白”的长度决定。通过删除基因H的中间部分或在那里形成一个小的重复序列，可以使尾部长度缩短或增加，并且尾部长度与该蛋白的大小成正比。这些结果可被视为蛋白质工程的一个特殊案例，即超分子蛋白质工程。
