Rumraket
July 26, 2022, 10:26pm
3
Also very interesting. And again we see examples of folding proteins evolving from short peptide sequences that are capable of forming higher order structures through oligomerization. Goes together well with the paper I wrote about in this thread:
Came across this extremely interesting paper on the biorxiv:
Abstract
Engineers routinely design systems to be modular and symmetric in order to increase robustness to perturbations and to facilitate alterations at a later date. Biological structures also frequently exhibit modularity and symmetry, but the origin of such trends is much less well understood. It can be tempting to assume – by analogy to engineering design – that symmetry and modularity arise from natural selection. But evolution, unlike engineers, cannot plan ahead, and so these traits must also afford some immediate selective advantage which is hard to reconcile with the breadth of systems where symmetry is observed. Here we introduce an alternative non-adaptive hypothesis based on an algorithmic picture of evolution. It suggests that symmetric structures preferentially arise not just due to natural selection, but also because they require less specific information to encode, and are therefore much more likely to app…