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The set of all proteins which can potentially be expressed in an organism is known. Now maybe we also get decent (static) structure information for these. But t
by Rochus 6y ago
The set of all proteins which can potentially be expressed in an organism is known. Now maybe we also get decent (static) structure information for these. But the interaction of a virus with the host cell is much more complex. There is much more than just an amino acid sequence involved. And these parts are all moving, so a static picture as we now can create faster than before does not contain all the information necessary to fully understand the functions.
- jjk166 6y agoPrecisely why I referred to it as a different and harder problem
- weregiraffe 6y ago>The set of all proteins which can potentially be expressed is known. Sure, "known", but it's on the order of 20^10000. It won't fit in the entire visible volume of the universe.
- Rochus 6y agoNo, the genome of the host is much smaller than the theoretical number of combinations. There are about 20 to 30k different proteins in a human cell (about 20k directly encoded on the DNA).
- jjk166 6y agoIf you are designing proteins, you're not limited to those that are already encoded in the host's DNA.
- Rochus 6y agoRight, but you made the example with the virus docking at a known organism. If you do synthetic biology and modify bacteria to produce any proteins then the situation is different of course.