Work

Enzymes are substances that speed up the chemical processes in organisms' cells without being consumed. It was long thought that all enzymes were proteins. Sidney Altman and Thomas Cech demonstrated that RNA can also function as an enzyme. In 1978, Altman studied an enzyme taken from the E. coli bacteria that has the ability to cleave RNA. This enzyme was a combination of a protein and RNA. Altman discovered that the enzyme lost its ability to cleave if the RNA was removed from the protein. Later, he also succeeded in proving that RNA alone had the same ability to cleave as the enzyme.