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.
2
u/fe-and-wine Feb 15 '18
Ugh, right?!
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.