Question: How do you resurrect molecules?

Betul Arslan answered on 17 Jun 2010:

Thanks for the question. We are resurrecting molecules via a computational program. It is similar to the work of a language expert who works on resurrecting an ancient language. They need to find the current descendant of an ancient language and then go back in cultures and see who used that particular language and so on. That way you can see the evolution of a word.

Similarly, we watch the evolution of a molecule in time, starting from it’s descendant (modern version). The molecule I refer to is proteins. Proteins are like words too, they are coded by letters (DNA) which are translated in meaningful sentences in our cell machinery. By using a computer algoritm, step by step, we calculate the probability of each possibile version of a letter (DNA) at each time point. Later we send the computational data to a company and they ship us the final synthesized protein within weeks 🙂 (it’s magic!) Let me know if there is any point you wish me to go deeper. Thanks for the question, Daniel.