I am working on some very smart things to say here. Really. Meanwhile, there's 
I want to point you to a fascinating write-up by Mo at Neurophilosophy. It is about renegade proteins (proteins are long chains of molecules vital to life) that recruit other well-behaved ones into a sinister and fatal plot to pulp animal brains (including humans). These kind of proteins - called Prions - have been implicated in the Mad Cow Disease. Mo writes,
It is now known that the clumps of abnormally folded prion protein can break down into smaller fragments. Thus, if infected tissue is consumed, these fragments act as "seeds", which cause the normal protein in the host cells to adopt the abnormal configuration and begin to accumulate, in a process called a nucleation-polymerization reaction.So far in all my reading, nothing has brought home the idea that Form is Function more than this. The mechanism by which this disease spreads is even more astonishing. When an animal consumes the tissues affected by the disease, it gets affected too. Mad Cow disease spread because cows were fed other cow tissue. In humans, as Mo points, it spread in tribes that practiced cannibalism.
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Part of my research concerns computer simulations of a protein called amyloid involved in Alzheimer's disease, and that's another kind of protein that links form to function like nothing else. Interestingly the protein is normally produced in the body and nobody really knows what it does, or what it is that causes it to suddenly misfold and cause havoc. Not just that, research (especially by Chris Dobson at Cambridge University) has suggested that many, almost any, proteins can acquire a similar structure as amyloid given the right conditions. It's a fascinating area.
Posted by: Ashutosh | October 7, 2008 6:23 PM