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I worked for a professor (James Milner-White) who was interested in early protein evolution and I remember a conversation we had about the possibility that prot
by gilleain 4y ago
I worked for a professor (James Milner-White) who was interested in early protein evolution and I remember a conversation we had about the possibility that proteins could have evolved from large to small.
Not sure if it was from a published paper, but the idea was that early proteins might have been large - say several hundred residues - but mostly disordered.
The smaller, more ordered 'domains' would then have evolved within these larger chains. Recombination and deletion would then have pruned down the disordered parts to leave more efficient smaller proteins.
No idea if that idea makes sense or has any research behind it, but it's quite a neat theory.
- ngc248 4y agowow ... it makes sense ... more of a top down approach.
- feet 4y agoIts actually top down and bottom up at the same time. All of biochemistry operates on the basic rules of physics which determine how the chemistry happens with feedback from the surroundings/system as the top down part
- MereInterest 4y agoThere was a paper a few years ago about a similar effect in artificial neural networks [0]. The gist was that a large network can contain many subnetworks, and the number of subnetworks grows much faster than the size of the network they are contained in. They were able to find a subnetwork in a randomly weighted network with equivalent performance to a trained network of a much smaller size. [0] https://arxiv.org/abs/1911.13299 https://arxiv.org/abs/1911.13299
- randcraw 4y agoKnowledge Distillation is a related concept in deep NNs, as are the concepts behind the compression of data in signal processing.