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anonymous_teve t1_iramala wrote

You got the right info below, but I want to comment to elaborate a hair.

As others have noted, you can do this with cumbersome chemistry, but we tend to much more easily use DNA to make protein, just like cells do. Why is that so much easier? Because we're leveraging the molecular machines that already exist in cells for this exact purpose--and they are GREAT at what they do!

It's not a metaphor to call enzymes in the cells machines--they really are, just made differently than machines humans make. So now that we know how to leverage the machines inside cells (or even take them out of cells) as little protein factories, is so much easier than trying to do the chemical steps individually--that's exactly what the existing machines, honed by a billion years of evolution, are built to do. And they are amazing at it.

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yeeturking OP t1_iraof1v wrote

yaa ya im aware of that i was just wondering why chemical synthesis is almost never done .

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UEMcGill t1_iraqvlx wrote

Proteins are floppy for lack of a better word. They're long and stringy, and can have multiple results. Think of it like trying to react spaghetti, and each way you bend the spaghetti gives you a different result.

When I was in college in the early 90's I had professors spending lots of supercomputer time just trying to predict protein folding.

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