Software Developer - IT Consultant

Why is design for catalysis important for management of molecular processes?

Lets consider a virus like the T even coliphage , it is basically a set of macromolecules that perfoms the task of replicating itself.
It is a self-replicating machine.
In order to acieve this ultimate goal a series of steps have to be performed, they are initiated by the attachment of the virus to the bacterial envelope. From there on a very large number of events leads to its ultimate replication.
How can it be that all of this happens on an organised way ?

The key is chemical kinetics, chemical kinetics involves the speed of a chemical reaction.

If at some point in time a molecular system has say one million possibilities to evolve, then the molecular system will evolve in all this directions with a particular speed. If one of these directions has a speed much faster that all the others then the system will evolve predominantly in this one direction. If moreover the new state that the system acquires as a consequence of this process makes all other possibilites unfeasable, then we have an organised step in a molecular process. If thousands of these steps take place in a concurrent fashion we have a molecular machine.

Living organisms achieve that goal by means of enzymes.

It is thus very important to find a way to control the speed of molecular processes that are important for our goal.

Design for catalysis is a concept that is designed to assist with the search for molecules (catalysts) that can be used for this purpose. It can also help to build molecules that both can be acted upon by these catalysts and that serve as the building blocks of our molecular processes.