The journal Naturwissenschaften turns 100 this year. Naturwissenschaften translates as “The Science of Nature”. It’s a journal that publishes papers in all areas of the biological sciences, broadly conceived. As many other journals have done, Naturwissenschaften is celebrating its 100th anniversary by posting a list of its 100 most cited papers. As with all such lists, especially with generalist journals like this one, what you find interesting may be different from what I find interesting, so it’s worth taking a look at the list yourself. However, if you’re reading this blog, perhaps we share some interests.

The first thing I noticed was that the list contained several of Manfred Eigen’s papers on biological self-organization, including his classic papers on the hypercycle. These papers were intended to address the problem of how biological organisms may have gotten started. The emphasis of this work tended to be on self-replicating molecular systems, such as the hypercycle, which is a family of models consisting of networks of autocatalytic units coupled in a loop. I’m not sure how large a contribution these papers made to the problem of the origin of life, but they sure caught people’s imaginations when they were written, and they led to interesting questions about the dynamics of systems with loops which are still being actively studied. If you have never read anything about hypercycles and have an interest either in theories on the origin of life or in nonlinear dynamics, you should track down these papers and read them. They will likely seem a little dated—they were written in the 1970s—but I think they’re still interesting.

Also near the top of the list, we see a paper by Karplus and Schulz on the “Prediction of chain flexibility in proteins”. Protein dynamics is all the rage these days. Everybody wants to think about how their favorite protein moves. This wasn’t always so. In the 1980s when this paper was published, we were starting to see a steady flow of high-quality x-ray protein structures. People were making very good use of these structures to understand protein function, and of course that is still the case. However, there was a tendency for biochemists back then to think of protein structure as an essentially static thing. This tendency was so pronounced that I remember attending a seminar in the mid-1990s at which the speaker made a point of talking about how cool it was that part of his enzyme could be shown to have a large-scale motion as part of its working cycle! The Karplus and Schulz paper therefore has to be understood in this context. At the time it was written, it wasn’t so easy to recognize flexible parts of proteins, and there was a lot of skepticism that flexibility was important to protein function. Needless to say, things have changed a lot.

The Naturwissenschaften list also includes a paper by Bada and Schroeder on the slow racemization of amino acids and its use for dating fossils. Living organisms mostly use the L isomers of the amino acids. Over time though, amino acids tend to racemize to a mixture of the L and D forms. While an organism is alive, this process is, in most tissues, completely insignificant since proteins are turned over relatively rapidly. After an organism dies, turnover starts, and we can use the D to L ratio to date fossil materials. There are other interesting applications of this technique, including its use to determine the ages of recently deceased organisms using the eye lens nucleus, a structure formed in utero. I wrote about this dating technique in my book.

I’ll come back to Naturwissenschaften‘s list in a few days. There are a number of other papers in there that I think are interesting.