Biology Reference
In-Depth Information
Table 11.8 The components of the communication system modeling biological evolution
System components
Identification (see Fig.
11.22
)
Source of messages
Biological evolution regulating the linear sequence of amino
acids of enzymes through DNA and RNA (see Step 1)
Channel
Polypeptides, conformons, IDS (see Steps 2 and 3)
Receiver
The living cell (see Step 4)
The Conformon Equation: n!/(n-x)! = 20^(n/p)
Series 1 = number of amino acid residues per conformon (
x
) =
3
;
Series 2 =
4;
Series 3 =
5
; Series 4 =
7
; Series 5 =
10
35
Series1
30
Series2
25
20
Series3
15
Series4
10
Series5
5
0
0
50
100
150
200
Number of Amino Acid Residues in Enzyme (
n
)
Fig. 11.23 A numerical simulation of the
conformon equation
derived from the model of
biological evolution shown in Fig.
11.22
. See text for more details
where n
the number of
the amino acid residues constituting a conformon that participates in (or are essential
for) a catalytic act such as binding, de-binding, covalent rearrangement, free energy
storage, and free energy transfer; and p
¼
the number of the amino acid residues of an enzyme; x
¼
¼
the maximum number of the conformon-
mediated catalytic steps within an enzyme molecule. For convenience, Eq.
11.19
will be referred to as the “conformon equation.” Inserting into the
conformon
equation
a set of reasonable numerical values for a typical enzyme, i.e., n
¼
150
and p
10, it is found that the average number of the amino acid residues
constituting one conformon is approximately nine (see Table 2 in Ji 2000). This
appears to agree with the number of the evolutionarily conserved residues involved
in numerous enzymic functions described in Lockless and Ranganathan (1999),
S
¼
uel et al. (2003), Poole and Ranganathan (2006). The results of a more systematic
calculation based on Eq.
11.19
are depicted in Fig.
11.23
, from which it is clear that
the following generalization can be made:
The number of conformon-mediated catalytic steps are directly proportional to the number
of the amino acid residues constituting an enzyme and inversely proportional to the number
of the amino acid residues constituting a conformon.
€
(11.20)
