Unusual DNA structures and misfolded proteins

Unusual DNA structures and misfolded proteins Alan Herbert, Founder and President of InsideOutBio, discusses the evolution of biological concepts related to DNA and protein structures, highlighting how traditional models have evolved due to new data and discoveries. Much of modern life depends on precisely engineered, highly reliable machines. Such concepts originally shaped our view of biology, beginning with the famous ‘watchmaker’, whom William Paley anointed in 1802 as the creator of life. This concept of ideals was continued by the lock-and-key model of antibody-bound toxins proposed by Ehrlich in 1900, and by the modern view that proteins control the readout of genetic information through the highly specific recognition of nucleotide sequences. All these proposals assume that the world as we see it today has always been this way. They ignore the past worlds that existed before these innovations arose. Each model was based on limited data or on the selective use of that data. They failed when the volume of contradictory information generated by technological advances was overwhelming. These transitions occurred as the Linnean catalog of life forms in the 1700s expanded, as new chemical elements were discovered in the 1800s, and as the zoo of exotic subatomic particles was discovered in the early 1900s. A similar transformation is now occurring in biology, where the old concepts of just a few years ago no longer align with the data.