Re: scientific american

From: CurtAdams@aol.com
Date: Mon May 29 2000 - 12:56:14 MDT


In a message dated 5/29/00 9:26:18 AM Pacific Daylight Time, hal@finney.org
writes:

> Cells are constrained by the materials they have to work with, and by
> the fact that the error rate in constructing proteins prevents them
> from building ones beyond a certain size. So what they do is build
> them with self-assembling sub-units. If a sub-unit is malformed due to
> an error, it won't fit with the others and so it won't be picked up in
> the self-assembly. At least that seems to be the theory.

I'd never thought of it that way. That's an interesting
model. Do you have a ref I could chase down?

I'd always thought subunit assembly had to do with
actually carrying out the assembly. But that's just
my intuitive reaction, not founded on data.



This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Thu Jul 27 2000 - 14:12:04 MDT