{"id":1100,"date":"2007-02-07T08:39:37","date_gmt":"2007-02-07T08:39:37","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/scienceblogs.com\/principles\/2007\/02\/07\/new-developments-in-inscrutabl\/"},"modified":"2007-02-07T08:39:37","modified_gmt":"2007-02-07T08:39:37","slug":"new-developments-in-inscrutabl","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/2007\/02\/07\/new-developments-in-inscrutabl\/","title":{"rendered":"New Developments in Inscrutable Chemistry"},"content":{"rendered":"

Eurekalert has a press release from Yale<\/a> proclaiming that:<\/p>\n

\n

Chemists at Yale have done what Mother Nature chose not to — make a protein-like molecule out of non-natural building blocks, according to a report featured early online in the Journal of the American Chemical Society. <\/p>\n

Nature uses alpha-amino acid building blocks to assemble the proteins that make life as we know it possible. Chemists at Yale now report evidence that nature could have used a different building block – beta-amino acids — and show that peptides assembled from beta-amino acids can fold into structures much like natural protein.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

What’s going on here is that they’ve, taken molecules that aren’t the amino acids we normally use, and, um, made molecules from them that sort of look like proteins. I think. Really, I’ve got nothing, here– this is far enough out of my field that I don’t really know what they’re talking about, and the more technical news story<\/a> might as well be in Urdu for all the sense I can make of it.<\/p>\n

This caught my eye because of past speculation about quantum information– back when I was still on Usenet, I remember some people making a big deal out of the fact that there are only twenty amino acids in use in nature, and twenty happens to be the maximum size of a search space for Grover’s algorithm for some small system size. This led to some Penrose-ish speculation that life is inherently quantum, with proteins being assembled efficiently by some sort of quantum enhancement.<\/p>\n

This always struck me as little more than numerology, but it was certainly a memorable idea. I tend to be reminded of it when I see articles like the press release linked above. I have no idea what the implications of this result for that theory (or vice versa) would be, but I thought I’d highlight the article anyway. Maybe one of the many bio\/chem types running around here can make more sense of it than I can.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Eurekalert has a press release from Yale proclaiming that: Chemists at Yale have done what Mother Nature chose not to — make a protein-like molecule out of non-natural building blocks, according to a report featured early online in the Journal of the American Chemical Society. Nature uses alpha-amino acid building blocks to assemble the proteins… Continue reading New Developments in Inscrutable Chemistry<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"1","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[33],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1100","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-in_the_news","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1100","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1100"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1100\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1100"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1100"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1100"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}