Rumraket
June 15, 2021, 9:23pm
91
Recently found a couple of articles very relevant to this continued misapprehension about the relationship between biological functions and polymer sequence space:
Found this paper on arXiv:
Abstract:
At odds with a traditional view of molecular evolution that seeks a descent-with-modification
relationship between functional sequences, new functions can emerge de novo with relative ease. At early times of molecular evolution, random polymers could have sufficed for the appearance of incipient chemical activity, while the cellular environment harbors a myriad of proto-functional molecules. The emergence of function is facilitated by several mechanisms intrinsic to molecular organization, such as redundant mapping of sequences into structures, phenotypic plasticity, modularity, or cooperative associations between genomic sequences. It is the availability of niches in the molecular ecology that filters new potentially functional proposals. New phenotypes and subsequent levels of molecular complexity could be attained through combinatorial explorations of currently available molecular variants. Natural selection does the rest.
It’s hard to pi…
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