alt Hacker NewsThis 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.
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They found "several thousand" novel folds? I had remembered that there were around 1000:
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7072414/
Oh ok, I misremembered:
"This review has focused only on small fragments of fold space with examples given for folds generated from a single secondary structure string consisting of around ten SSEs. Even in this small corner, the number of possible folds, under the current constraints, is of the order of 1000"
What plagiarism even means in context of proteins? That one protein steals a fold of another protein without giving proper credit to it?
> Natural selection has no analogy with any aspect of human behavior, However, if one wanted to play with a comparision, one would have to say natural selection does not work as an engineer works. It works like a tinkerer - a tinkerer who does not know exactly what he is going to produce but uses whatever he finds around him whether it be pieces of string, fragments or wood, or old cardboards; in short it works like a tinkerer who uses everything at his disposal to produce some kind of workable object.
―François Jacob, “Evolution and Tinkering” (https://web.mit.edu/~tkonkle/www/BrainEvolution/Meeting9/Jac...)