The molecular interaction of the aminoacyl tRNA with the gates changes thefunction of the ribosome, so that a bigger or smaller gate means a more or lessaccurate protein.So lets see how scientists use this idea in a practical method called SELEX (whichstands for Systematic Evolution of Ligands by EXponential enrichment). This isessentially evolution speeded up and takes advantage of molecular interaction.Lets say you want to produce an RNA molecule that binds to ATP- from scratch. (ATPis a molecule that is crucial to life, and here it is simply an example. Also,please follow the illustration in the description box). What you do is you startwith a column (a popular tool in chemistry) of resin with ATP attached. You send10 to the 15th power of random RNA sequences that are 25 nucleotides long throughthe column of resin. This high number of 10 to the 15th power ensures completerandomization of 25 nucleotides (since 4 to the 25th power is 10 to the 15th).Simply put, this is AS RANDOM as you can get.So what happens is that there are certain RNA sequences that will interact weaklywith the ATP and stick to them in the tube. Those that do not interact will flowright through the column and be washed away. Then you take those RNA moleculesthat bound to the ATP and run them through a cycle where you convert the RNA toDNA using reverse transcriptase and you convert the DNA back to RNA using RNApolymerase. All living things use RNA polymerase to convert DNA to RNA, so, thisis a completely natural process. The RNA polymerase adds new random mutations tothe RNA sequences. Then you run these new sequences with the new random mutationsthrough the column and repeat this cycle a dozen times until you end up with anRNA sequence that binds extremely tightly to ATP.So once again, interaction leads to function and CHANGES in those interaction (inthis case random mutations) leads to CHANGES in function (in this case tighterbinding to ATP). Using SELEX, scientists have isolated artificial ribosomes thatsynthesize artificial peptides (the word peptide simply means small protein). Whatis interesting is that these artificial ribosomes have highly conserved sequencesfound in all peptidyl transferase active sites same as in normal naturalribosomes. So artificially we came to the same conclusion as nature did, whichshows the importance of the idea of selection to evolution. Since the selection isthe same in both cases (which is that it needs to bind the amino acid to thegrowing peptide) we get the same result, even though we started with completerandom chance in the beginning. This is really important to understand: both thenatural and artificial means came to the same conclusion despite the random chancein the beginning, since the natural selection which was consistent in both cases.In the end the randomness is “forced” to converge on this sequence. This gives theillusion of “design”.So scientists have used a similar process to determine the complicated pathwaysthat require many cellular changes. For example, we have 20 amino acids commonlyused in our body. So how would nature add a new amino acid? How do we get from 19to 20 or 20 to 21. In order to do this we need three things: a new aminoacyl tRNAsynthase, a new tRNA with the proper codon and a new amino acid. The tRNA synthaseloads the proper amino acid into the tRNA. So it MUST be unique, along with thetRNA codon and the amino acid. Clearly, this is a complicated process, but byrunning many positive and negative selection cycles, they produced all the newcomponents required for this to work.There are two arguments that can be made against this: first is that this requiresa working RNA polymerase and a living creature to do all this. This argument isabout abiogenesis, so I will get to it in a later video. The second argument isthat since scientists were required for this experiment to work, it proves thatintelligence is necessary. Well consider what scientists did that was so profound
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