 can wrap around many different partners, something that proteins with a unique 3-D structure cannot do.)
Folding only as needed, the flexible protein p27 (green) can wrap around many different partners, something that proteins with a unique 3-D structure cannot do.
Image: Illustration by AXS Biomedical Animation Studio
In Brief
- According to conventional wisdom, proteins must fold into rigid shapes to perform such tasks as binding to specific target molecules. But recent work suggests that one third of the types that exist in humans are partially or completely unstructured.
- Although lack of folding was long considered a pathology, it need not hamper functionality—and it is in fact often crucial to a protein’s workings.
- Unstructured proteins may have played important roles during evolution, and a better understanding of their true nature may also lead to the design of novel drugs.
Proteins are the stuff of life. They are the eyes, arms and legs of living cells. Even DNA, the most iconic of all molecules in biology, is important first and foremost because it contains the genes that specify the makeup of proteins. And the cells in our body differ from one another—serving as neurons, white blood cells, smell sensors, and so on—largely because they activate different sets of genes and thus produce different mixtures of proteins.
Given these molecules’ importance, one would think biologists would have long figured out the basic picture of what they look like and how they work. Yet for decades scientists embraced a picture that was incomplete. They understood, quite properly, that proteins consist of amino acids linked together like beads on a string. But they were convinced that for a protein to function correctly, its amino acid chain first had to fold into a precise, rigid configuration. Now, however, it is becoming clear that a host of proteins carry out their biological tasks without ever completely folding; others fold only as needed. In fact, perhaps as many as one third of all human proteins are “intrinsically disordered,” having at least some unfolded, or disordered, parts.
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Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisAURA
As an experiment, after a brisk walk on a cool morning remove your clothing and jump into bed. It doesn't take long before warm air is wafting from the covers. Feel your skin it will be cold.
An atomic reaction is taking place within your body changing water to what it was made from H2O (gas). This heated excreting gas is made up of miniature nuclei containing a nucleus that has all the information of its parent. Contained in that water cell that changed to gas is the complete (including Memory) make up of you.
This aura (or con zillions of you) are now on an adventure of Evolution. Some of these will mutate on the body and can be detected by smell. If a bathing doesn't take place a good magnification will show things with legs (bed mites) (probably they will be Earths next dinosaur. Others of you are been dispersed where ever you are or go (its this Aura that a tracking dog homes in on).
An accumulation or Aura in a packed state can manifest into ghost. Most of these particles amalgamate with the Earths centrifugal force and are taken aloft to become the nucleus of a water cell (rain drop).
The moment you die a measurable 3/4 troy ounce of your make up including memory is recycled by the brain (reverse evolution were the orbiting nuclei of the nucleus is sped up in which each cell or particle is smaller than the last).
This 3/4 ounce of energy does not stay on Earth but is whisked out into space to be used some where, some time, some how by something. It comforts me to know that their will always be a part of me tucked away some where out there.
cbc.ca bruce voigt
So we have big news on both battle fronts: the scientific and the esoteric.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisOn the former, it now turns out that THE TERTIARY STRUCTURE OF PROTEINS IS NOT UNIVERSAL. (The primary structure is the string of aminoacids like beads on a necklace, the secondary ditto is that string twisted nicely into a helix like a spring or a corkscrew, the tertiary ditto is the helix folded upon itself into a tight, apparently messy, knot, and in some cases there is a quaternary ditto, namely, aggregations of two or more of the shorter strings.)
…and on the latter, we're now told that the "aura" is made up of the water vapor molecules one transpires, each one of whose three atomic nuclei carries all of an individual's personal record, both genetic and mental (something like a miniature individual Akashic Record), but why would each one of those water vapor molecules bear three copies of the entire imprint of our lives and genetic makeup, and not, for example, the carbon dioxide molecules we exhale (three nuclei in this case, too), or the methane expelled from the opposite end (four nuclei, and thus a possible set of four copies)?
As for the weight of the "ghost", "soul", or whatever the proper name for it happens to be, it was a Dr. Duncan MacDougall (c. 1866-1920) who claimed to have established it as being 0.75 oz. (21.3 gr.), yet "MacDougall's results were flawed because the methodology used to harvest them was suspect, the sample size far too small, and the ability to measure changes in weight imprecise".
It seems like the death watch this kind of thing requires is too stressful for doctors and patients to bear in our present times and so no one is willing to put it to the test in a second, definitive round of measurements. Who shall find the cool, calm and collected doctors and subjects for this? For their price is far above rubies (cp. Proverbs 31:10).
Sorry: the methane molecule (CH4) is a set of five, not just four, atoms, of course.
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