How will kinetics and thermodynamics inform our future efforts to understand and build biological systems?
Résumé
When I started graduate school, we were taught that every protein has a single unique three-dimensional structure that defines its function. Thirty years later, it is now clear that many proteins include domains that assume different structures in response to binding partners or small molecules. Likewise, RNA molecules can form kinetically trapped intermediates that slowly refold into their functional forms. Only by discovering such kinetic and thermodynamic properties of molecules can we hope to understand molecular structure at a level necessary to engineer it..
