[Tex/LaTex] LaTeX not hyphenating properly, text running off page

hyphenationline-breaking

I'm having a problem with LaTeX not hyphenating $\beta$-galactosidase, and the word as a result running off the page.

I have narrowed down the problem to a particular package, as a bare minumum LaTeX preamble with no packages avoids this problem. Please help me to identify the offending package by process of elimination, and suggest a solution that retains the use of the package where possible.

\documentclass[a4paper,12pt]{article}

\usepackage[a4paper]{geometry}

\begin{document}
Finally, all of the three antibiotics examined had a negative effect on $\beta$-galactosidase activity from the time they were introduced to the assay.  It is to be noted that chloramphenicol interferes with the 50S ribosomal subunit which negatively implicates peptide bond formation~\cite{chloram1962}, streptomycin interrupts the initiation stage of protein synthesis~\cite{strepto1968}, while rifampicin is an RNA-polymerase inhibitor~\cite{rifam1983}.  These results verify that both transcription and translation are needed for the gene product $\beta$-galactosidase to arise, which is probably not much more than a validation of the flow of genetic information in accordance with central dogma.  An interruption at the transcription or translational stage would prematurely or directly halt the production of $\beta$-galactosidase, in the two respective cases.
\end{document}

Sample output:

enter image description here

Best Answer

The problem is that TeX doesn't know how to hyphenate the word $\beta$-galactosidase because it has a $\beta$- attached to it. The best solution to this problem is to load the hyphenat package, and use \hyp{} instead of the -:

\usepackage{hyphenat}
$\beta$\hyp{}galactosidase

This tells the hyphenation to hyphenate the word after the \hyp{} as a regular word.

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