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Do you recognise the molecular structure? Chemistry laureate Roger Kornberg solved the structure of RNA polymerase II. In order for our bodies to make use of the information stored in genes, a copy must first be made and transferred to the outer parts of the cells. There it is used as an instruction for protein production – it is the proteins that in their turn actually construct the organism and its function. The copying process is called transcription. Roger Kornberg was the first to create an actual picture of how transcription works at a molecular level in the important group of organisms called eukaryotes (organisms whose cells have a well-defined nucleus). Mammals like ourselves are included in this group, as is ordinary yeast. In 1959, the then twelve-year-old Roger Kornberg came to Stockholm to see his father, Arthur Kornberg, receive the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for his studies of how genetic information is transferred from one DNA-molecule to another. Kornberg senior had described how genetic information is transferred from a mother cell to its daughters. What Roger Kornberg himself did was to describe how the genetic information is copied from DNA into what is called messenger-RNA. The messenger-RNA carries the information out of the cell nucleus so that it can be used to construct the proteins. Kornberg received the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 2006. Photo caption: RNA Polymerase II. This is the enzyme in mammalian cells that catalyses the transcription of DNA into messenger RNA, the molecule that in turn dictates the order of amino acids in proteins. Photo credit: David Bushnell, Ken Westover and Roger Kornberg, Stanford University.