Difference between revisions of "Ribosome like chain assembly"

Revision as of 12:32, 15 April 2021

This is is about assembly methods with nanoscsale devices that

• take in in raw parts (of more or less pre(self)assembled form)
• push out a chain that folds itself up into a bigger product

Actual ribosomes

• Taken in are amino acids linked to much bigger TRNA handles
• Pushed out are protein chains that fold up right away (thermally driven)

Often (always?) membrane proteins assemble right away directly into a target lipid membrane.
Btw: How do the chaperone folding helper proteins come close enough when there is quite a bit of obstruction by the ribosome?

Blochchain extruding Foldamer printers

This is about foldamer printers that make making parts that are bigger than their own build volume

If the parts of the chain become too big to self-assemble in reasonable timescales nonthermal self assembly can be used.
It seems this requires the parts to be linked together into a chain.
But the parts are much bigger than simple amino acids here. The parts would be bigger stiff blocks of high geometry.
So this could work more like folding up chain of via hinged linked cuboid (or other highly geometric) blocks.

Differences between ribosomes and blockchain extruding foldamer printers (on the input side):

Ribosomes get their building blocks delivered via a mixed soup of tRNA handles which encode the amino acid they hold.
There is only one binding site which at no time accepts more than one type of amino acid.

Foldamer printers have their building blocks of one type washed in as a pure solution carrying only one type.
And that after a site activation step where several sites where activated.

(wiki-TODO: add illustrative image for that idea)

Related

• Self folding: a nanoscale device synthesizing and extruding the foldamer chain is not neccesarily incuded here