What is the importance of a proteins three-dimensional structure?
Why did nature evolve proteins to do this? Why didn’t it choose to use DNA or RNA as a means to be structural material or catalytic material? It really has to do with the diversity of chemical structures that you can call upon. It allows us to have metabolism which is a really underrated thing-it’s really [a great innovation] that we’re able to actually eat things around us which are really heterogeneous stuff and we are able to convert it over into things we can use. It’s astonishing. This is all enabled by the fact that these proteins have great substrates for evolution-essentially proteins evolved for evolvability. Very subtle changes that you can make in a protein in one location can very subtlety tweak a shape in an active site so as to allow you to gain type of specificity you need to make a biochemical pathway work. [Here are] some specific examples of a 3D structure doing things biochemically: We’ve know that enzymes, which are protein catalysts, are able to accelerate the rate
