Memorizing and Confusing More Than One Conformation

The above ideas are really far reaching. As an example of their application in a more subtle context, let s consider the possibility of a protein having not one but several distinct low energy folded states. Such phenomenon is known to biologists and medical doctors some proteins have two or sometimes even three different folded states, and depending on the conditions (or even on chance) they can fold into either one of them. Sometimes this has bad medical consequences in one of the folds protein performs some useful function, while in the other it causes some deadly disease, such as. 

Note that protein sequence can serve as a code because the number of possible sequences,, is greater that the number of possible conformations, Indeed, imagine that in a coimtry of inhabitants you 

This truly exciting result was first obtained in 2001 by T. Fink and R. Ball at Cavendish Laboratory, Cambridge University in England . We mention three interesting consequences of this result. First, the number of possible memorized conformations does not depend on the chain length, N. Second, given that In 20 3, we see that regular proteins can memorize 

One can then speculate that the existing alphabet of Q = 20 amino acids is the result of evolutionary trade-off having smaller Q would not allow sufficiently stable proteins (restricting the latent heat q) having a larger Q would make too many possibilities for prions. 

---