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Originally posted by Heraclitus
How many different kinds of proteins are there?
How many different kinds of proteins are there?
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I'm not an expert, so I can't really answer that accurately... I know that there are something on the order of tens of thousands of identified proteins in the human body, and significantly more than that in the rest of the world, but I don't have an accurate guess beyond what google could tell you. We're talking actual proteins here, by the way - not theoretical proteins, as in 'what happens if I put this set of amino acids together in this way'.<Reverend> IRC is just multiplayer notepad.
I like your SNOOPY POSTER! - While you Wait quote. -
By kinds do you mean the families of related proteins, the groupings of proteins by function or individual proteins?Originally posted by Heraclitus
How many different kinds of proteins are there?Exult in your existence, because that very process has blundered unwittingly on its own negation. Only a small, local negation, to be sure: only one species, and only a minority of that species; but there lies hope. [...] Stand tall, Bipedal Ape. The shark may outswim you, the cheetah outrun you, the swift outfly you, the capuchin outclimb you, the elephant outpower you, the redwood outlast you. But you have the biggest gifts of all: the gift of understanding the ruthlessly cruel process that gave us all existence [and the] gift of revulsion against its implications.
-Richard DawkinsComment
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I'm interested in both the nubmer of indivdual proteins and their relation.Originally posted by Starchild
By kinds do you mean the families of related proteins, the groupings of proteins by function or individual proteins?
BTW Can a small change to a proteine cause it to radicaly change its effect? Or will it more or less have similar effects to the orignal one?Modern man calls walking more quickly in the same direction down the same road “change.”
The world, in the last three hundred years, has not changed except in that sense.
The simple suggestion of a true change scandalizes and terrifies modern man. -Nicolás Gómez DávilaComment
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Depends what you change. A change to one amino acid could knock out the protein's function while changing hundreds might not do anything.Originally posted by Heraclitus
I'm interested in both the nubmer of indivdual proteins and their relation.
BTW Can a small change to a proteine cause it to radicaly change its effect? Or will it more or less have similar effects to the orignal one?Exult in your existence, because that very process has blundered unwittingly on its own negation. Only a small, local negation, to be sure: only one species, and only a minority of that species; but there lies hope. [...] Stand tall, Bipedal Ape. The shark may outswim you, the cheetah outrun you, the swift outfly you, the capuchin outclimb you, the elephant outpower you, the redwood outlast you. But you have the biggest gifts of all: the gift of understanding the ruthlessly cruel process that gave us all existence [and the] gift of revulsion against its implications.
-Richard DawkinsComment
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Assembling Living Things From Nonliving
Well, first you need a lab assistant, preferably hunchbacked and named Igor. Then you need an open-minded morgue and either a powerful electric generator or a convenient thunderstorm. Once you have those it's just a matter of combining the elements in the right fashion.
Or so I hear.Comment
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Proteins are basically big molecular structures, some part(s) of which are effector areas (areas that actually do something to some other protein/molecule/etc, or cause something to be done to the protein by some other protein/molecule/etc), and some part(s) of which might not be involved in any particular element of a protein's function (but might be involved in some other element; or might not be involved in any way except to provide size or general structure or whatnot). For example, imagine this interaction:Originally posted by Heraclitus
I'm interested in both the nubmer of indivdual proteins and their relation.
BTW Can a small change to a proteine cause it to radicaly change its effect? Or will it more or less have similar effects to the orignal one?
)------C <-\\//--\\<-<
This is massively oversimplified, but in this example the C is the cell's receptor that the protein interacts with, and the < is the functional area of the protein. The rest of the protein might have some changes to it and not prevent the interaction from taking place, like so:
)------C <-----\\|||//<
Still works. But if anything changed the shape of the < so that it was no longer the right shape:
)------C |-\\//--\\<-<
Now the protein would be pretty much useless.
Most of the time the interaction is much more complex, often involving many proteins interacting between each other, or even interacting at different points on or in a cell to cause effects on each other, so it could easily have effects that aren't immediately obvious; and you never know what effects any given amino acid might have on the folding of the protein or the final shape.
But, often one change won't hurt significantly, which is ultimately how evolution works - little changes that don't hurt (but don't immediately help), but eventually work out something more interesting.<Reverend> IRC is just multiplayer notepad.
I like your SNOOPY POSTER! - While you Wait quote.Comment
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Re: Assembling Living Things From Nonliving
You monster.Originally posted by Elok
Well, first you need a lab assistant, preferably hunchbacked and named Igor. Then you need an open-minded morgue and either a powerful electric generator or a convenient thunderstorm. Once you have those it's just a matter of combining the elements in the right fashion.
Or so I hear.Comment
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