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It 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/Transfe
by alex_stoddard 17y ago
It 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."