The Central Dogma of Molecular Biology has never been seriously challenged. Here is your chance: can you conceive of a mechanism whereby genetic information can flow directly from proteins to nucleic acids?
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A kind of chimera between a chaperone, a ribosome and a RNA-polymerase. The chaperon domain will unfold the protein so the side chains of the amino acids could be recognised and read by the ribosome domain. In this part, each side chain will be asociated with a set of specific three bases. For example, leucine with its long hydrocarbon chain will always be asociated with a cytosine, uracil and cytosine. There is not need for a degenerate code this time because we go from 20 to 64 amino acids. This is the tricky part, because it is difficult to imagine an active center that has the side chain and allows the entrance and location of nucleotides. After that, the polymerization of nucleic acid occurs (I bet for RNA) thanks to the polymerase domain.
Because it is an inversion of the proccess I propose the name of chaperoborimerase for this chimeric macromolecule
By the way. Congratulations for the recent prize.
Posted by: Manuel Sánchez | November 12, 2009 at 11:07 AM