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Monday, January 3, 2011

PROTEIN INTELLIGENCE AFFIRMED

From Science, the journal of the American Assocation for the Advancement of Science, volume 330, 17th of December 2010, page 1607:

'...to simulate the gyrations proteins make as they fold... is a combinatorial nightmare. Each two neighbouring amino acids in a protein chain can bind to one another at two different angles, each of which can have three conformations. So a simple protein with 100 amino acids can fold in 3198 different ways. Getting at the atomic detail is even scarier. Proteins sort through all those possibilities in milliseconds or less. Computers take far longer.'

Which confirms and underlines the point made often in this blog: biodevelopment is intelligent, it has enormous computational power, it works out the best result, at micro level in milliseconds and at macro level over the aeons.