Eurekalert has a press release from Yale proclaiming that:
Chemists at Yale have done what Mother Nature chose not to — make a protein-like molecule out of non-natural building blocks, according to a report featured early online in the Journal of the American Chemical Society.
Nature uses alpha-amino acid building blocks to assemble the proteins that make life as we know it possible. Chemists at Yale now report evidence that nature could have used a different building block – beta-amino acids — and show that peptides assembled from beta-amino acids can fold into structures much like natural protein.
What’s going on here is that they’ve, taken molecules that aren’t the amino acids we normally use, and, um, made molecules from them that sort of look like proteins. I think. Really, I’ve got nothing, here– this is far enough out of my field that I don’t really know what they’re talking about, and the more technical news story might as well be in Urdu for all the sense I can make of it.
This caught my eye because of past speculation about quantum information– back when I was still on Usenet, I remember some people making a big deal out of the fact that there are only twenty amino acids in use in nature, and twenty happens to be the maximum size of a search space for Grover’s algorithm for some small system size. This led to some Penrose-ish speculation that life is inherently quantum, with proteins being assembled efficiently by some sort of quantum enhancement.
This always struck me as little more than numerology, but it was certainly a memorable idea. I tend to be reminded of it when I see articles like the press release linked above. I have no idea what the implications of this result for that theory (or vice versa) would be, but I thought I’d highlight the article anyway. Maybe one of the many bio/chem types running around here can make more sense of it than I can.