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> A protein can misfold in countless ways, and there are countless of proteins to misfold. They are countable, but yes there are many ways, but that alone does
by tomxor 5y ago
> A protein can misfold in countless ways, and there are countless of proteins to misfold.
They are countable, but yes there are many ways, but that alone doesn't mean it's capable of meaningfully evolving. It's a search space multiple orders of magnitude smaller than a piece of DNA, so it's easy to see how a different successfully propagating misfold will be significantly less likely when starting from an existing propagating misfold.
If you are suggesting one propagating misfolded protein can, by chance, misfold into another propagating misfolded protein at a rate fast enough to become adaptive... then it's qualitatively the same as a virus, but I don't see this as likely given the significantly smaller search space.
- arghwhat 5y agoThe largest protein we produce is about 27k amino acids, more complicated than most virophages. That is merely the biggest we produce. I know of no upper limit on protein complexity, and that is before even taking folding options into consideration. The space of possible proteins - and thus prions - is not at all limited, neither figuratively nor literally. It is most certainly not "countable" without some Nobel-prize inducing discovery.
- tomxor 5y ago> The largest protein we produce is about 27k amino acids, more complicated than most virophages The only known human prion proteins seem to be a few orders of magnitude smaller than that though, and they don't appear to adapt. Are you saying it's possible for prions to emerge from large proteins with the ability to adapt?