Molecular Biology of the Cell

An introduction to the essentials of the molecular biology of the

cell would easily fill this book. Instead I shall focus on one set

of problems in molecular biology that Francis Crick, one of the

discoverers of the DNA double helix, has termed the central dogma

of molecular biology. This central dogma states that there are three

types of crucial biological macromolecules, DNA, RNA and proteins,

that “communicate” such that genetic information flows in the single

direction from DNA via RNA to proteins. Figure 1.1 specifies the

different steps of that information flow that we discuss in the

following.