In this letter to the editor of Nature Crick cast doubt on the contention by two researchers at King's College that certain amino acids could bond directly to their codons (the triplet of bases of messenger RNA that specify a particular amino acid), without the intervention of messenger RNA. He drew on stereochemistry, the chemical theory that deals with the relations of atoms within the three-dimensional space of a molecule, to prove that the direct fit between amino acid and anticodon proposed by the two researchers was not possible.
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