November 07, 2017 Tuesday
Bedtime Story
Sequence Motif
This book “The Machinery of Life” will
convey to you the exquisite intricacies that operate in our cells at every
moment of our “ordinary” existence and that perhaps should be enough to get
something excited about.
Molecules that operate the cellular
machinery are vividly brought to light by the lovely hand-drawn pictures that
Goodsell has taken great pains to draw.
Now let me take you back to the concept of
biochemical motif that we were discussing yesterday.
The other type of motif that is encountered
in biochemistry is the sequence motif that is related to sequential arrangement
of the amino acids in case of proteins and of the nucleic acids in cases of
DNA/RNA.
It is this sequence motif that was being
referred to in the 2002 paper of Ruud Jansen.
This sequential motif translates into vital
biological functional importance as it is almost like coding of genetic
information inside the chromosomes of cells.
This can be better understood with an
example.
In the biochemistry of our cells, there is
a biochemical process that goes by the name of N-linked glycosylation.
In this process, a specific type of sugar
known as glycan gets chemically linked to amide nitrogen of the asparagine
amino acid in a protein.
Now this process of N-linked glycosylation
can be understood in form of an algorithm that looks like this:
Asn,
followed by anything but Pro, followed by either Ser or Thr, followed by
anything but Pro
Asn = Asparagine
Pro = Proline
Ser = Serine
Thr = Threonine
These four absurd names are names of four
of twenty two or so amino acids that form all proteins in our body.
The above sentence can further be encoded
in a software type programming instruction the following manner:
N{P}[ST]{P}
Where N stands for asparagine, P stands for
proline, S for serine and T for threonine
N{P}[ST]{P} this then become the N-linked
glycosylation motif in our language that is encoded in chromosomes in the
universal genetic code of life
After studying and analyzing lots of
genetic code for specific functions we now have a substantial data base of
sequential motifs.
With this much information, there now exist
algorithms and software programs that when fed with genetic code, they would be
able to work out the probable sequential motif.
I shall be giving you an example of such an
algorithm/program in the nights to come.
Stay tuned to the voice of an average story storytelling
chimpanzee or login at http://panarrans.blogspot.com
Good night mon ami and my fellow cousin ape.
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Another great educator and a teacher that I am aware of is
Professor Subhashish Chattopadhyay in Bangalore, India.
While I narrate stories, Professor Subhashish an electronic
engineer and a former professor at BARC, does and teaches real mathematics and
physics.
He started the participation of Indian students at the
International Physics Olympiad.
Do visit him here:
All his books can be downloaded for free through this link:
For edutainment and English education of your children, I
recommend this large collection of Halloween Songs for Kids:
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