Is rRNA easy to handle in lab?
Ribosomal RNA is universal. It occurs in every living organism. In a typical bacterial cell there are on the order of ten or more thousands of copies of the ribosome. So that this is a piece of nucleic acid that is ten thousand fold amplified over any other particular gene, which is expressed in only one or two copies. So for that reason you have the amount of it running in your favor and the laboratory techniques for extracting ribosomes had become very sophisticated by the time I started. It’s very easy to break open a cell and centrifuge out the ribosomes, for example, and then separate the large subunit of the ribosome from the small, and then extract the RNA from the small subunit, in this case. These were routine operations. Whereas, for example, to isolate any other given protein, that would have been a rather lengthy thing to do, and many of them couldn’t even be isolated at that point. But when of course their genes could be sequenced, which was later, then more molecules coul
