The "Digital Code" of DNA

A lot of things given the high level of polymorphism which can be present without having any structural effect at all on the produced protein. Do you think you could change every third note of a Piano concerto and get away with it?TTFN,WK

Come on Rob, just reading this it comes out as either stupid or disingenuous.Surely it should say ..."But... the fact is that there are approximately 30 thousand different known proteins based upon the arrangement of sequences of lengths varying from hundreds to thousands of digits composed of four distinct chemical digits."In your computer analogy it is like saying that because computers operate in binary they can only do 2 things. To take a non-code example it is like saying that because there are only ~118 elements in the periodic table then there can only be 118 materials. It is the combinatorial structural composition which produces different materials and similarly produces differnt protein coding sequences.TTFN,WK

So instead of just something stupid or disingenuous it should have been something irrelevant to start off with and then the same stupid/disingenuous elision? Well, its your sentence. Maybe when you were dotting the 'T's you shouldn't have had your 'I's crossed.*I'm sorry*.Funnily enough the sort of high level protein structure we are talking about her includes structural levels up to the quaternary.What is specified by DNA is the primary structure of the amino acids, i.e. which one comes next in the polypeptide sequence. The higher levels are the secondary, which covers the various basic structural fold and loop elements of protein conformation, the tertiary, which is the exact spatial form the protein will take and includes the sort of residue and atomic positional relationships you mentioned. The quaternay structure is the way several seperate polypeptide products can combine to produce larger functional proteins, i.e. the way 4 haeme bearing subunits combine in haemoglobin.But all of these higher levels and other modifications of the protein are based at root upon its primary structure. In fact it is almost as if the chemical characteristics of the amino acids in that primary structure encode information for the way the peptides should be folded in the cell to make a functional protein, now what does that remind me of.TTFN,WK

Actually the arrangement of a song should be ... TTFN,WK