Replies to post #294968 on Anavex Life Sciences Corp (AVXL)

[falconer66a]

Cellular complexities; their origins.

And if you get to the point where you are, in understanding, how do you explain how all this comes about when any two drunk or otherwise ignorant people can make a baby?

Who figured out what goes where and such?

These are not peripheral, tangential, or insignificant questions, either as to the exact origins of biological complexities (such as the biochemical and genetic operation of cells), or even as to understanding, to a degree, how the Anavex sigma-1 receptor activators can work — which directly involves proteins and their folding.

I learned cellular biology, first in high school, from an exceptionally gifted biology teacher — who inspired me to become a biology teacher myself. That was in the mid-60s, when the mechanisms of both genetics and cellular biochemistries were first being understood, ever so simplistically at the time. Today, we understand these things far more completely, although things like protein folding still have their secrets and mysteries (as with the causes, mechanisms, and treatments of cancers and CNS diseases).

To understand protein folding one must understand what's being folded. Sure, proteins. But what are they? Where do they come from? How are they made in the cell?

All of that is an entire course in biochemistry. But for this, understand the mysteries of the origin of the ribosome, a tiny organelle that produces proteins, an exceptionally difficult thing to do perfectly. In the simplest explanation, the ribosome takes individual amino acids floating in the cell and inserts them inside, where, guided by RNA, in proper sequence, the amino acids are stuck end to end to produce, first, a peptide, a short fraction of a protein. Later, in the ER, peptides are connected end to end, in the proper sequence, and folded. Folded, functioning proteins. Wonderful.

But, ponder the ribosome, the cellular device that sticks the amino acids together. It, too, is made of proteins, with thousands of amino acids precisely in order, all folded into the ribosome itself: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ribosome#/media/File:010_large_subunit-1FFK.gif

Biologists still ponder the primordial origin of the ribosome, which makes proteins, which is made of proteins itself. Proteins, especially the complex ones in the ribosome, can't be made without a ribosome. Hence, whence the first ribosome? Figure that out and you'll have to make at trip to Sweden, for your Nobel Prize.