E. Ruoslahti coauthored, with M. D. Pierschbacher, a 1984 study showing that a short synthetic peptide could reproduce a measured cell-attachment activity of fibronectin. This connected cell adhesion to a specified part of a protein sequence.[ref]
The tested peptide contained arginine, glycine, aspartate and serine. Finding activity in a defined fragment supplied a way to ask which features of the original fibronectin molecule were needed for that particular interaction.[ref]
An illuminating comparison is between recognition and the complete biological task. A small fragment can retain an attachment signal while lacking the size and other binding regions of the original protein. Localizing a recognition sequence therefore does not reduce every property of the original molecule to that sequence.
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