The Unreasonable Redundancy of Nature's Protein Folds

hirenj

This approach is pretty much like the TED approach from a few years back. As far as I remember there wasn’t a ridiculous amount of fold diversity there either. It turns out evolution isn’t averse to a bit of liberal protein plagiarism. https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.adq4946

h_a_n_k

cool post! it's funny how many things in this world are naturally graphs. i think it's neat how, especially in biology, a lot of high-dimensional objects, like protien sequences, converge onto lower-dimensional representations, like protein structures. i did neuroscience for grad school, and i was always amazed by how often complex neural activity could be well represented by lower dimensional representations--clean manifolds, attractor dynamics, etc. i think, in general, biology (evolution) doesn't penalize against redundancy too hard (hence things like genetic drift, neutral theory of evolution, etc.). anyway, super cool stuff. agree with you that probs more useful to explore the search space via 'less natural' structures, given how forgiving evolution is to redundancy. probs where the most information can be found