[ExI] Survival (was: elections again)

[Eugen Leitl]

On Wed, Jan 02, 2008 at 12:55:06PM -0600, Bryan Bishop wrote:

> Doesn't this require an understanding of protein folding, or are you 

The problem is far from being intractable, even for us who
go on two legs:

	http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CASP
	http://predictioncenter.org/

It doesn't have to solved by brute force, though it is
certainly solvable by brute force (= MD of the entire assembly
at full detail).

> expecting we'll just come across the knowledge of what-builds-what 
> through lots of trial and error practice that we're already getting?

Let's say we have a fold predictor engine that folds a protein (or
even just small, fast folders) in 10 min. It's cheap enough to build
a 10 k cluster of those. This is good enough to do the reverse folding
problem (finding the sequence of the desired shape) practically.
In practice this directly competes to in vitro evolution, and experimental
structure resolution (which has made very large progresses lately, 
mostly due to automating the pipeline).

-- 
Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org">leitl</a> http://leitl.org
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