The birth of proteins, uncovered

In 1956, Francis Crick set forth the Central Dogma of Molecular Biology: our genomic material, DNA, is used to produce mRNA, the mobile instructions for protein synthesis. In the years since Crick’s pronouncement, our knowledge of the dogma has only grown more intimate: we’ve discovered complex networks of gene regulation, DNA sequences that do not make proteins, and the ability to visualize DNA replication and the creation of mRNA. However, translation, the process by which cells create proteins using an mRNA template, remained difficult to see until recently, when several groups published methods for viewing new proteins as they are born