[T]he confidence in the unlimited power of science is only too often based on a false belief that the scientific method consists of a ready-made technique, or in imitating the form rather than the substance of scientific procedure, as if one needed only to follow some cooking recipes to solve all so
Lab-on-a Chip Expands Functional Studies of Enzyme Variants
July 22, 2021
A microfluidic platform for high-throughput expression, purification, and characterization of enzyme variants has been applied to the study of a familiar enzyme, PafA (phosphate-irrepressible alkaline phosphatase of Flavobacterium). [Daniel Mokhtari, Stamford University]
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Just because an enzyme has an active site doesn’t mean the rest of the enzyme should be disregarded, as though it were so much dead weight. It influences enzyme function, if only by keeping the enzyme from unraveling and losing its function altogether. The rest of the enzyme may also fine-tune enzyme function in ways that are rather more subtle too subtle, alas, to be determined without the patient study of enzyme variants, that is, versions of the enzyme that incorporate one or more mutations. Because studying how mutations affect enzyme function is such a painstaking business, the mutations that are assessed tend to be close to yo
Namely,
a
raft of still-unexamined evidence that required additional computer analysis that might shed light on the mystery, according to anonymous senior administration officials.
In other words,
the US government has been sitting on
a large collection of intelligence in perhaps the most important investigation into an economy-wrecking global pandemic, as China destroyed evidence and has refused to cooperate with international probes. According to the report,
Biden s call for the new investigation was in response to the new evidence.
While officials declined to describe the new evidence, they are hoping to apply an extraordinary amount of computer power to analyze what the