Rescue Proteins Leave Evolutionists In The Ditch
Put intuition aside for a moment and imagine a scenario where E.coli knockout strains that have been deleted for conditionally essential genes are rescued by proteins taken from a protein library composed of >106 de novo designed sequences. The prevailing assumption- that functional proteins are constrained to a very small subset of possible sequences- would lead us to infer that finding them by a random search through sequence space would be tantamount to impossible. But a PLOS One paper published in early 2011 appears on the surface to have given us much room for thought. Scientists from Princeton’s Department of Chemistry and Molecular Biology used a combinatorial library of 102-residue long proteins to rescue non-viable E.coli knockouts. The functional losses in the knockout strains affected serine, glutamate and isoleucine biosynthesis and disabled the cells’ natural capacity for iron acquisition in iron-limited environments. Read More ›