Detour: Fireflies and the Non-Ribosomal Code

Deduction of partial non-ribosomal code using fireflies

When Marahiel started his groundbreaking work on decoding the non-ribosomal code in the late 1990s, 160 A-domains had already been sequenced, and the amino acids that they encode had been experimentally identified. However, it was still not clear exactly how each A-domain encoded a specific amino acid.

We showed an alignment of three A-domain intervals in the main chapter, but Marahiel actually aligned all of the 160 identified A-domains in order to reveal the conservative core. Yet it still ...