In a sweeping new study, researchers at the University of Pennsylvania Medical Center have shown that the natural engineering principles governing electron transfer within proteins are significantly less complex than has been the prevailing view. Electron transfers of the kind investigated represent the fundamental atomic-level exchanges that underpin the energy economies of all living things.
Reduction is the receipt of an electron, and oxidation is the release of an electron.
About a third of all known proteins are electron-transfer proteins. The new findings have some important implications. Nature, it would appear, recognizes a point of diminishing returns in the evolutionary refinement of biological mechanisms, opting in this case for a flexible, more robust system over an optimized, finely tuned one that might be more vulnerable to disruption by mutations. Second, the results point to a greatly simplified approach to the design of entirely new biologically active molecules, likely to be of immediate use in drug development efforts, and construction of such molecules is already under way at Penn. A report on the study appears in the November 4 issue of Nature.