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Ribosomes are productive nanosystems, that is, machines that combine small molecular building blocks under digital control to build complex structures. Digital
by biohacker42 17y ago
Ribosomes are productive nanosystems, that is, machines that combine small molecular building blocks under digital control to build complex structures.
Digital control?
They’re programmable by means of genetic engineering
Mmmm... they're hackable by means of genetic engineering. Programmable for me still means you can build exactly what you want from scratch.
based on structures determined by x-ray crystallography
x-ray crystallography is a dark and mysterious art, no seriously it is, it's a close to vodoo as any science can be.
Regarding catalysis: There’s none, in the usual chemical sense — ribosomes merely provide positional control that produces a high effective concentration of the right reactive molecules in the right place at the right time, thereby implementing the most straightforward kind of mechanosynthesis.
I'm pretty sure there may be some quantum tunneling going on.
- TrevorJ 17y agoRe: programmable - is it safe to assume that given sufficient understanding of DNA and biology one could in fact build what they want from scratch?
- biohacker42 17y agoYes. But it's a HARD and fascinating subject. Sadly we're not close to that, I consider 20 years or so to be "close".
- alex_stoddard 17y agoIt would depend on how fancy you can get with engineering custom [transfer RNAs] (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transfer_RNA http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transfer_RNA), which are the bridge between the genetic code and the proteins that get made at ribosomes. Within the limits of the chemistry one could get to work I see no a priori reason why something other than amino-acids (the building blocks of proteins) couldn't be attached to the tRNAs. Proteins have the additional very valuable property of being essentially self-assembling - the 3D structures or proteins form inherently from their linear sequence of amino acids. That is one of the key reasons why a linear genetic code works to produce all the many varied proteins in living things.
- biohacker42 17y agoProteins have the additional very valuable property of being essentially self-assembling Chaperone proteins? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chaperone_(protein) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chaperone_(protein)
- alex_stoddard 17y agoI was hedging with "essentially". I didn't want to make an already biogeeky post too obscure. Some proteins can renature without chaperones. Also to quote the wikipedia article, "Chaperones do not necessarily convey steric information required for proteins to fold: thus statements of the form `chaperones fold proteins` can be misleading."