On Mon, 24 Jan 2000, John Clark wrote:
>
> On the other hand there may well be a very good fundamental reason
> why a protein could never do such a thing and I'm just unaware of it.
> So a tree that produces a delicious fruit with a pit made of pure perfect
> diamond may be a fantasy, or it may not. If anybody knows why I'm
> talking nonsense please let me know now before I embarrass myself
> any more.
>
I've thought about this a little. I don't think the activation energy
for sticking a C atom onto a diamond face precludes an enzyme from being
able to do it. I think a more difficult problem would be the difficulty
of grabbing onto a flat surface to position the addition. If it was
a really big enzyme and a really small diamond brick you wanted to produce
I could envision a really large collection of enzymes that grabbed the
brick and stuck atoms in all of the different locations. I'd suspect
however, that it would be easier to get enzymes to add to the
end of a buckytube before you could do diamond crystals. And that
wouldn't be such a bad thing.
Robert
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