Obscure Biochemical Paradox May Explain Why We Can't Find Alien Life

whole wonderful prisoners in Anton and today we're going to be talking about to some extent forming Paradox to what extent yet another Paradox from microbiology and we're actually going to be exploring some ideas that have been personally bugging me for quite a long time the ideas behind proteins protein formation protein structure and how all this kind of relates to the so-called Rare Earth hypothesis and to some extent a lot of this is going to be based on some of the modern research but to be more exactly it's going to be based on a lot of misunderstanding or our ignorance in terms of a lot of things when it comes to life now if you've been on a channel long enough and I'm talking about like really long you know that some of the First videos were actually based on medicine biology and microbiology and that's because that was my primary research and primary interest initially and I was starting to be a doctor I did kind of give up on it eventually mostly because I realized it wasn't really my choice it was more like my mom's choice and well as you probably know my mom passed away after this I had a bit of crisis and end up pursuing a lot of other things but there were some really interesting things I've learned in microbiology and in basically biochemistry that I still cannot explain actually I think nobody can explain them for example one that you can find in the description below is known as the Leventhal's Paradox a paradox originally proposed by Dr Leventhal back in the 60s although the original paper and the original proposition has already been lost and actually had to rely on the Wayback machine to even Discover at least one paper mentioning all of this and kind of describing what he originally reposed and how it works his ideas are related to what's known as a rate of natural region or in other words how various amino acids that are put in a very long chain then end up folding into a functioning protein now it's a concept that doesn't really come to you right away and it's actually kind of difficult to understand but in a natural we know that pretty much everything in our bodies is made out of amino acids we usually call these chains of amino acids peptides or poly peptides and they do form real totally long chains anywhere from just a few amino acids up to hundreds or even thousands and here we're talking about these macromolecules these large molecules connecting to one another in a very specific order and since human body has approximately 20 000 different proteins that it's made out of with each of them made out of a few hundred amino acids but amino acids in a very specific order to some extent you can think of these as Lego blocks that produce you and me but that's a very simplified version of this specifically because of that Paradox I just mentioned if you were to take each of those amino acids and if you were to put them in order they're not really going to function yet they're not going to turn into anything or produce any kind of function they actually have to fold first and so to be more exact that primary protein structure then has to start folding into secondary structures and eventually start producing even more complex stuff and this is where things get really really complicated this is actually one of the biggest mysteries and one of the biggest studies in modern biochemistry the study that tries to predict what type of a shape a protein will form based on a specific sequence of amino acids now in the past the scientists use various scanning techniques and extremely complex scanning techniques to try to discover a shape of a known protein for example here's one of the most important if not the most important proteins on the planet this is known as Ruby score and this is the shape that is going to assume if you put approximately 250 different amino acids in a certain order in a natural rubisco is responsible for the photosynthesis in various photosynthetic life and is essentially responsible for driving everything on the planet if it wasn't for this no life could create any energy on the planet and there will be basically no life on the planet at all this is actually believed to be the most common protein on planet Earth but it took years and years of research to find out what shape the actual amino acids take even though the scientists knew exactly what amino acids it contains or if we were to use Legos again as an example all of these Amino assets are basically like building blocks and even though you connect them into some kind of a structure they're not necessarily are going to be producing anything functional yet until they fold into an actual shape but how they form into this shape is a question that we currently cannot answer but this particular Paradox takes it a little bit further these scientists behind this Paradox realize that well if you were to take amino acids each of them would have a very specific way in which the actual connection between these molecules can then start folding in other words if you were to take two Lego pieces there is basically a limited way in which you can assemble them but when it comes to relatively long chains of amino acids each of them having just a few different ways of folding ends up producing huge amounts of possible configurations and we're not just talking about thousands or Millions we're talking about astronomical numbers actually even the word astronomical here doesn't really do it justice we're talking about numbers with like 300 zeros at the end and so if you have all these chains of different amino acids and they start folding one after another if they start trying all these combinations at least in theory even if they do this really really really really really really fast according to the Paradox it would actually take them longer than the age of the entire universe to fold just one single protein yet somehow the nature found a way to create this shape in just a few milliseconds which means that this fooling process has something really strange and mysterious about it and we really don't understand how any of this works we know that the folding can only happen in various specific conditions though for example extremely specific pH levels specific temperature of 37 degrees Celsius also specific light conditions sometimes and even change in one condition will not produce this at all but how the nature is able to fold all this so quickly without trying all the combinations is the premise of this particular Paradox well I guess we can actually take this particular thought experiment a little bit farther let's go back to Ruby score right here so this protein has approximately 250 different amino acids on average some of them can be longer some of them can be shorter it actually depends on the type of rubisco and the type of the organism now knowing that each of these amino acids inside rubisco has many different ways of folding and creating other shapes one question that comes to mind here is what's the chance that somewhere out there somewhere in our galaxy maybe another planet or even somewhere in the universe you would actually have exactly the same type of amino acids in the same order folding in exactly the same way as this in other words what's the chance that we're going to find rubisco somewhere else out there forming completely by chance and that's actually the question that's very difficult to answer because a lot of different factors come into play but if we go back to that original Paradox the 11th of paradox and when you sound the math from the Paradox itself we know that this protein is going to have roughly around 10 to the power of 300 different ways that it technically can fold by itself or basically you'll have this many possible configure iterations based on the way those amino acids can then rearrange themselves and this is a huge number as I mentioned astronomical actually more than astronomical let's go back to astronomy to try to compare let's start with our own Galaxy so if we were to consider every planetary object in the galaxy and we're not just talking about planets we're talking about dwarf planets various types of moons a lot of possible objects for life can form how many do you think there are out there in a galaxy just our galaxy itself so just take a guess how many do you think now it's quite common to assume that it's going to be a big number but not as big as you think based on the approximate number of stars in our galaxy and based on a number of planets We Believe exists per star along with various planetary objects that are traveling between stars and are possible in moons as well the scientists believe there might be approximately 10 to the power of 20 various planetary bodies look at it somewhere in our own galaxy The Milky Way and that's of course a number that has 20 zeros in it this number has 300 zeros it's an astronomically bigger number okay let's take this a little bit farther let's assume we're talking about the entire observable universe with all of the galaxies and all of The Intergalactic space in it some of the recent studies predict that there might be about 2 trillion galaxies out there would all of them potentially contain just as many planets on average which means that the number might now be this with this right here being one of the higher predicted numbers 10 to the power of 33 potential planetary objects we're talking about planets moons and so on objects where in theory life could one day evolve and form chains of amino acids which could then start folding into a lot of other shapes thus producing more complex life an amino acids themselves the tiny blocks have been discovered in a lot of different objects out there including asteroids including various types of moons and so on so that's not really the problem the problem is what's the chance that all of them will connect and then fold into to a functioning shape similar to what we're made out of what's the chance that they're actually going to produce some kind of a protein like rubisco right here that then starts photosynthesis and that right there is the mystery that's the Paradox because we have no idea how proteins form and how they're able to form so quickly even though they should take trillions and trillions of years to form just one protein this right here is one of the main reasons why it's actually kind of impossible to predict if life can exist out there mathematically at least based on the idea of protein shapes and based on this number I just showed you if this is the number of planetary objects and this is the number of potential ways a protein can fold before it can produce something functional the chance of finding a protein like rubisco elsewhere is ridiculously small yet somehow proteins on planet Earth worked out the way to fold perfectly to create you and me even though each of them has so many potential ways they can actually fold and so many ways they can fold where they basically do absolutely nothing but these two concepts they fall holding of proteins and the potential discovery of life elsewhere in a galaxy or actually the entire universe in my opinion are connected directly we cannot really expect to find life out there if we can't figure out if life can even form out there maybe all of this was by chance a tremendously small chance and maybe all this only happened here but we have a chance to answer this question and it's actually through trying to study how proteins form on the planet and by trying to solve that particular level those Paradox now the question is how far are we did we actually get any closer to figuring out or predicting how proteins fold well this is actually an intriguing topic and it's one of the biggest topics and one of the biggest studies in computational biology as of today every two years there's a really important competition based on the idea of predicting protein structure it's known as cast or a critical assessment of structure prediction and the last one was in 2020. the way it works is really simple the scientists that have discovered a new product who structured the original usually ask various computational teams that want to participate to try to predict the three-dimensional structure if they're only given the chain of amino acids so basically here they're given the Lego blocks and they're asked to predict what sort of shape is going to produce and up until a couple years ago the predictions were I guess kind of they weren't really super bad but they definitely were not good either usually 50 50 but then these guys came in this is obviously that company now owned by Google the company that became famous when their artificial intelligence known as alphago was able to beat the Korean champion in Go the game that sort of looks like this that up until this point was impossible for any computer to beat but using the same algorithm they created something known as Alpha fold an AI based algorithm capable of using the database of 170 000 known structures to then try to predict the next structure for the next protein and back in 2020 the last time they the competition was held he was able to do so very successfully ninety percent of the time it essentially became the leader in predicting protein folding but 90 is not 100 and more importantly at the moment nobody actually knows how exactly it does so it seems to use certain correlations in predicting the potential shapes which obviously means that it might be used in various medical fields for example Fields where misfolding proteins are often associated with various disorders but it doesn't help us solve the mystery of how the proteins can fold so quickly in just a few milliseconds even though they have 10 to the power of 300 possible combinations to do so at any time now correctly predicting protein Falls using Alpha fold is still going to be super helpful in producing various drugs or obviously explaining various disorders or various conditions and that's of course without even knowing how the folding process works but it doesn't help us explain what's happening inside the proteins it doesn't help us solve the paradox it doesn't help us explain how life could potentially form elsewhere which kind of implies that until we figure out how alpha fold does its thing and how it's able to predict all of the following especially if it becomes even more successful reaching something closer to 100 we're not unfortunately going to be able to solve any of this and it's probably going to remain a mystery so even though there might be some kind of a fundamental solution to how all this happens and how the proteins then create everything well basically right now have no idea how this works but it seems to work well on our planet in the conditions that we have here and so chances are if we do find a Planet exactly like planet Earth in theory we might find life there but that's a really big Theory and that's of course based on a very simple understanding of what we see right now which doesn't really take us closer to solving for another Paradox or even 11 those Paradox and at least in my opinion makes the rare earth hypothesis even more likely but we might come closer to all of these answers once we figure out how this works how do they fold what happens why is it that it only takes a few milliseconds and how is Alpha fold able to do it as well the answers to some of these questions might actually be right here and by the way the 15th competition was actually conducted in August of 2022 but we don't really have the answers yet chances are alpha fought won again but we don't really know by how much yet and so I'm actually kind of excited to find out if maybe there are some more updates from alpha 14 and if they actually got closer to understanding how the algorithm works but until these results come out or until we know more that's I guess pretty much it a lot of speculations on my part but speculation is based on statistics based on the ideas coming from biology and based on the fact that we still haven't found a life anywhere out there even though the amino acids seem to be all over the place and so for all we know maybe Earth just had perfect conditions for all these amino acids to form perfectly and then to fold in the very perfect way but if that's the case we might be alone more about this in some of the future videos on from your Paradox some of the previous videos are also in the description below thank you for watching subscribe maybe support this channel patreon by joining Channel membership or by buying the wonderful person t-shirt you can find it in the description stay wonderful I'll see you tomorrow and as always bye [Music] [Music] thank you thank you

Channel: Anton Petrov

Views: 749,829

Keywords: anton petrov, science, physics, astrophysics, astronomy, universe, whatdamath, what da math, technology, steven universe, space engine, universe sandbox 2, fermi paradox, fermi, where is everybody, rare earth hypothesis, protein structure, levinthal's paradox, rate of naturation, protein structure prediction, rubisco, computational biology, casp15, deepmind, alphago, does alien life exist, are there aliens, proteins

Id: k_B9YP5nEWw

Length: 17min 9sec (1029 seconds)

Published: Wed Feb 08 2023