It's not just the workers who have to compete, the competition for ribosomes is not easy either!

Nowadays, competition is rampant in all walks of life, and young people who are involved in competition have to come up with tutorials on how to counter the competition, such as the post-00s generation rectifying the workplace and the post-00s generation rectifying the academic circle.

Image from Weibo

Have you ever thought that in places you can't see, other "little lives" are also involuting in their own way, such as ribosomes?

Today we will reveal the secrets of the ribosome race - "Gene Machine".

Ribosomes exist in every cell of every living thing. They can read our genetic code and produce proteins encoded by the corresponding genes to achieve thousands of biological functions.

The following content is excerpted from "Gene Machine"

Like most physicists, when I first arrived in California and began studying biology, I had no idea what a ribosome was, and the concept of genes was also confusing.

I knew that genes carry the biological traits we inherit from our ancestors and pass on to our descendants. They are the units of information that allow a single cell, such as a fertilized egg, to develop into a complete organism.

Although all cells contain a complete set of genes, different genes are turned on or off in different tissues, making a hair or skin cell completely different from a liver or brain cell. But what exactly are genes?

In general, a gene is a stretch of DNA that contains instructions on how and when to make a protein. Proteins perform thousands of different functions in life, such as enabling muscle movement, sensing light, touch, and heat, helping us fight disease, and carrying oxygen from our lungs to our muscles.

Even thinking and memory depend on proteins. Proteins that catalyze chemical reactions are called enzymes, and they help make thousands of molecules inside cells. Overall, proteins give cells not only their shape and structure, but also their functionality.

Besides being a stepping stone in our understanding of the crossroads formed by genes and the proteins they encode, the interest in the ribosome has a more practical reason.

Over the years, it has been realized that many antibiotics work by blocking the ribosome at different steps in the translation process. Human ribosomes are very different from bacterial ribosomes, so some antibiotics preferentially bind to bacterial ribosomes and can be used to treat infectious diseases.

As bacteria become more resistant to antibiotics, knowing exactly how antibiotics bind to the ribosome could help us design new and better antibiotics.

Although we know roughly what the ribosome does, we have no idea how any of the steps in this complex process of protein synthesis actually work, just as we know that a car has four wheels, windows, and a driver at the steering wheel, but we know nothing else about how it actually works.

Ribosomes are like the central processor of life's code and are the key to protein synthesis in cells.

END

Editor/Xiao Xitushuo