BioCoder #11

Chapter 2. Are Your Ribosomes in a Twist?

Making proteins the right way can be a challenge

Danfox Davies, Vulpine Designs

Tracing the intracellular contraptions of life is essential to understanding how to debug our life code. Alas, without a software development kit, API, or even a manual—let alone easy-to-understand source code—we have to reverse-engineer the machine code of living things. That’s the only way to find the causes of genetic diseases and to not just fix them, but to do so without breaking other parts in the process. Current methods tend to involve testing on genetically altered animals and cultured cells in long and expensive studies to find out if a certain applied change has the expected effects on protein composition, function, and organization, and to infer from this the way the system works. This can seem to even the bravest of minds like trying to fathom a recursive Rube Goldberg or Heath Robinson contraption. In this article we look at the cellular equivalent of compiler problems and the ways my company is trying to help.

In Tents

All biological cells have proteins to function. Proteins are strings of amino acids, folded up a particular way that serves a purpose, a bit like a pop-up tent. You can fit a pop-up tent in your car boot when it’s folded away; but when you reach the campsite, you need to have it quickly pop up in the rain so you can peg it down and get camping. When you get home, to allow it to dry properly, you might pop it up again but not peg ...