Not available – first paragraph follows: Interest in the developmental and molecular biology of the proteins that accumulate as reserves in seeds has become keen in recent years. Although most plant cells contain large numbers of different proteins, each present only in small quantities, food chemists, using criteria of size and solubility, long ago found that most of the protein in seeds of the soybean and other legumes appears to be composed of only a few different kinds. In the late 1960s we recognized that, if this were true, it was likely that a correspondingly small number of different kinds of messenger RNA (mRNA) molecules encoded to direct the synthesis of the storage proteins would also be present in higher concentrations in seed tissue cells. Higher concentrations of specific mRNA's would make it much easier to learn how these intermediaries between genes and their protein products are modulated and, in turn, how they control the rates of protein production.