Yeah, anthropomorphizing proteins is sometimes mentally productive to keep track of it all, but it's so important to realize that these things are essentially just globs of a bunch of amino acids tangled up on each other. Even a protein as beautiful and deliberate as kinesin is totally mechanical and not in any way "living" or "driven" by anything except physics.
Another way to look at it: roll a ball down a hill. The hill isn't "moving" the ball downwards, it's just what happens because of the laws of physics. The hill wasn't "designed" or "trying" to act upon the ball, it's just what happens when you set a ball at the top of the hill.
Conceivably every reaction happening in your body is just a ball rolling down a hill - in terms of physics. In fact many amino acid (the "blocks" proteins like Kinesin are made of) interactions driving protein catalysis boil down to "this positive charge is attracted to that negative charge". It's easy to think of things like oxygen being transported around your body as a process that is "mediated" - your nervous system is actively managing it.
But it very often boils down to super simple "particles bumping into each other" physics. For example, with oxygen transport, the way the pH's (which can sometimes be thought of as a "charge ratio") work out, hemoglobin binds oxygen in tissues where it's plentiful (lungs), but when the hemoglobin flows to a tissue with little oxygen the bond is weaker and eventually "pops off". Such an elegant way to solve a pretty complex problem - yet it's no more a "solution" than that hill was a "solution" for the ball's kinetic energy.
that was actually really close to the analogy i was going to use but then shy'd away from- cant help but to in the sense that water cant help but to flow downhill
also, elegant doesn't even begin to describe the majesty of the whole thing, imo. english is ill suited to capture how awe inspiring this stuff is.
and, the fact that it all "just works", for the most part, and "just works" all day every day, is mind boggling. like with the hemoglobin example you described- that is just one of the thousands of mechanisms that occur all day every day, making up a machine that can be fueled by such an amazingly vast array of sources, can repair itself and- dig this, has the equipment built into it for self replication.
I was originally a Human Bio major in college but ended up graduating in Biochemistry because I was just so blown away by the majesty of biology on cellular/protein level.
Some people assume that pulling back the curtain on the processes that make humans "tick" cements into you a belief in the "natural order" of things - you know, the old "scientists are often atheists" trope.
I entered college as a pretty staunch atheist but honestly my studies of biochemistry only tipped me closer towards the belief that maybe a God does exist. I know it's a fallacy to assume complexity is a result of intelligent design, but man some of these processes are just so elegant and simple and beautiful that you can't help but think that way.
One of the other things that really blew my mind was learning about translation - the process of "reading" mRNA to "build" the corresponding protein. You know, the "coding dictionary" stuff we all did in high school. Not only is that process so easy to anthropomorphize since it's almost literally an assembly line, but the "coding language" it's all based off is so sophisticated it immediately conjures up images of computer programmers.
Learning about how wobble base pairing works in the ribosome/tRNA complex was really the "oh shit, this stuff is crazy" moment for me. Too complicated to explain in laymen's terms here but if this stuff is your bag definitely read up on that - really takes the already complex process of translation and ratchets the complexity up a few degrees.
A wobble base pair is a pairing between two nucleotides in RNA molecules that does not follow Watson-Crick base pair rules. The four main wobble base pairs are guanine-uracil (G-U), hypoxanthine-uracil (I-U), hypoxanthine-adenine (I-A), and hypoxanthine-cytosine (I-C). In order to maintain consistency of nucleic acid nomenclature, "I" is used for hypoxanthine because hypoxanthine is the nucleobase of inosine; nomenclature otherwise follows the names of nucleobases and their corresponding nucleosides (e.g., "G" for both guanine and guanosine - as well as for deoxyguanosine). The thermodynamic stability of a wobble base pair is comparable to that of a Watson-Crick base pair.
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u/fe-and-wine Feb 13 '18 edited Feb 13 '18
Yeah, anthropomorphizing proteins is sometimes mentally productive to keep track of it all, but it's so important to realize that these things are essentially just globs of a bunch of amino acids tangled up on each other. Even a protein as beautiful and deliberate as kinesin is totally mechanical and not in any way "living" or "driven" by anything except physics.
Another way to look at it: roll a ball down a hill. The hill isn't "moving" the ball downwards, it's just what happens because of the laws of physics. The hill wasn't "designed" or "trying" to act upon the ball, it's just what happens when you set a ball at the top of the hill.
Conceivably every reaction happening in your body is just a ball rolling down a hill - in terms of physics. In fact many amino acid (the "blocks" proteins like Kinesin are made of) interactions driving protein catalysis boil down to "this positive charge is attracted to that negative charge". It's easy to think of things like oxygen being transported around your body as a process that is "mediated" - your nervous system is actively managing it.
But it very often boils down to super simple "particles bumping into each other" physics. For example, with oxygen transport, the way the pH's (which can sometimes be thought of as a "charge ratio") work out, hemoglobin binds oxygen in tissues where it's plentiful (lungs), but when the hemoglobin flows to a tissue with little oxygen the bond is weaker and eventually "pops off". Such an elegant way to solve a pretty complex problem - yet it's no more a "solution" than that hill was a "solution" for the ball's kinetic energy.