= E. Ruoslahti
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<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.<Cell attachment activity of fibronectin can be duplicated by small synthetic fragments of the molecule by M. D. Pierschbacher and E. Ruoslahti>[Original byline and Abstract]{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.<Cell attachment activity of fibronectin can be duplicated by small synthetic fragments of the molecule by M. D. Pierschbacher and E. Ruoslahti>[Abstract: four-residue cell-recognition sequence]{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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