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gilleaintoday at 8:09 AM1 replyview on HN

I see. I meant 'energetically accessible', but you mean more like 'affordably accessible' (in the sense that the molecular toolkit of a cell is what can 'afford' certain structures, due to chaperones available and so on).

Who knows what might be possible if you designed a cell from scratch - perhaps you could rework all the machinery to access other parts of fold space. After all, there are some weird and wonderful machines out there like the 'Vault' (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vault_(organelle)) that can fit whole proteins inside them. Possibly a different cage-like structure could help fold designed proteins into as-before unseen structures.


Replies

pfdietztoday at 2:07 PM

It could also mean "evolutionarily accessible". The basin of attraction in sequence space has to be sufficiently large that evolution could stumble across it.