Abstract
I first encountered ribonucleic acid in October 1968 (see early history of Computational Structural Biology, Levitt 2001). I worked on RNA for a few years and published three out of my five first papers on RNA (Levitt 1969, 1972, 1973) before abandoning the system as being too simple and not nearly as interesting as protein folding. This was my first of several career-level mistakes. In 1976, I also refused to get involved in the analysis of DNA sequences when Bart Barrell brought me the DNA sequence of ϕX174 bacteriophage (Smith et al. 1977; Levitt 2001). What I find most surprising about these mistakes is that the decisions seemed very easy when I made them and regrets came much more slowly but lasted longer. In 2008, RNA caught my fancy again thanks to a HFSP International collaboration spearheaded by Michael Kiebler (Medical University of Vienna), and I have now come full circle with four of my five most recent papers involving RNA.
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Levitt, M. (2012). Introduction. In: Leontis, N., Westhof, E. (eds) RNA 3D Structure Analysis and Prediction. Nucleic Acids and Molecular Biology, vol 27. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-25740-7_1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-25740-7_1
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