What: "Two other concepts were also revolving around in my head. One was an idea proposed two years earlier by scientists in California and in Paris to explain how cells manage to make proteins as accurately as they do. Protein synthesis is like stringing beads, but the trick is to select the right bead each time from the twenty different kinds that are available, and to do this at speed using rather basic molecular machinery. The new idea, called "kinetic proofreading," showed that cells could in principle be as accurate as they liked, but only at a cost. The cost was the use of extra chemical energy that would be needed to fuel the high-accuracy selection process. This was important because the model of error catastrophe showed that cellular meltdown could be avoided if proteins were made very accurately."

Writer: Tom Kirkwood

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Date: Oct 25 2013 6:49 PM