Re: West Virginia creationism

On 08/05/2024 23:55, Bob Casanova wrote:

On Wed, 8 May 2024 14:01:30 -0700, the following appeared in
talk.origins, posted by John Harshman
<john.harshman@gmail.com>:
 

On 5/8/24 12:01 PM, Ron Dean wrote:

What is so incredible is that there is about 1 million
proteins in the human body each made up of a specific order of amino acids.

>
That's certainly incredible. Where did you get that figure? Given that
there are around 20,000 protein-coding genes, that means that each gene,
on the average, produces around 50 different proteins.
>

Note the absence of the word "different" in his assertion.

>

It makes even less sense as a count of molecules. Reference to the web tells me that a "yeast cell" contains 42 million protein molecules. Both yeast and human cells vary considerable in size, but taking the typical numbers that Bing Copilot gives me (risky, I know), and assuming the same concentration of protein molecules in yeast and human cells, that's 600 million protein molecules per human cell, giving 18 quintillion protein molecules in a human body.
You can take the 20,000 of so protein-coding genes of the human genome (add the 1,000 or so additional proteins generated by alternative splicing), and then add all the junk proteins created a low concentrations by splicing errors, transcription errors during mRNA synthesis, loading errors in the formation of amino acylated tRNAs (attaching the wrong amino acid to a tRNA) and translation errors during protein synthesis (matching the wrong tRNA, or performing a frame shift*). With 600 million molecules in a cell, I can imagine that the number of different junk proteins in a cell at any particular time could be of the order of a million, though the existence of biases in all the above errors would tend to reduce the number of unique variants. Extending the line of argument to the human body as a well, somatic mutations among the various cells adds another source of variation. I wouldn't be surprised if the number of junk protein variants far exceeded a million. But this is speculation with little grounding in data - we'd need numbers on the various error rates - and in any cose is irrelevant to Ron Dean's supposed point.
--
alias Ernest Major