Chaperone

Sometimes things happen that impact your life. The ones which impact mine i remember really well – which is odd, because my memory works very “efficiently”, keeping me young with not too much stuff in mind, shortening the time behind me.

You know Chaperones?

Chaperon: “Traditionally, a chaperon was an older married woman accompanying a woman when men would be present. Her presence was a guarantee of the virtue of the young woman in question”.

Simple presence as guarantee of virtue...

some years ago i read a short article about HSP90, a proteine of the fruitfly Drosophila melanogaster. Only some words telling me, that these heat-shock proteins assist other proteins in achieving proper folding... The reason for this behaviour is that protein folding is severely affected by heat, for example, and therefore chaperones act to counteract the potential damage. By doing so they protect the phenotype of the fruitfly by buffering genetic variation in morphogenetic pathways.

I couldn’t understand that.

A single protein could control the phenotype?

Phenotype: “what an organism looks like as a consequence of its genotype” or Phenotype: “The phenotype of an individual organism is either its total physical appearance and constitution, or a specific manifestation of a trait, such as size or eye color, that varies between individuals.”

How could that be? How could the HSP90 know how the organism of its cell looks like?

Oh yes, sure, it’s simple: The HSP90 controls just the proper folding of important proteins of the fruitfly and when those important proteins are not properly folded, the cell can’t work and the fly would die – or change. In Drosophila, challenging HSP90 function by ... environmental stress can produce a profusion of morphological changes affecting virtually every structure of the fly.

I knew, HSP90 “controls just a starting point” of a chain of reactions...

however, how could the knowledge of the “physical appearance” be stored in a single conglomeration of molecules?

In the mid of the night i got my heureka moment. Suddenly i woke up, finding me sitting up in bed, saying something like “that’s it”.

Knowledge is more than “knowing something”.

The HSP90 “knows” about the phenotype of its organism because of its own “body” – its own body based on electromagnetic fields and the physical interaction of nucleons and electrons creates a dynamical system able to communicate with the “important proteins” to “convince” them of the proper folding just by simple physics, therefore prohibiting...

a chain of events, leading to an unwanted result. Because Drosophila wants to survive, its cells used the little HSP90 because HSP90 knows how to protect what Drosophila preferred to look like - and so Drosophila uses that information.

Information.

Knowledge.

Communication.

Wants and wishes. Preferences...

at the level of some molecules and atoms dancing together.

Knowledge can be stored in bodies, information can be used by simple physical interaction, preferences can be fulfilled by possessing the proper structure.

In that night i understood that the memory of the cell first worked “analog”, that HSP90 might be something like the first step of gathering the information about the own body, long before DNA.

At that time i didn’t know what information is – but i bet, without HSP90 i wouldn’t have understood information and information processing systems, because you have to accept, that information can flow at the level of molecules and atoms, that information, knowledge, can be stored in bodies, in material systems.

You have to accept that you didn’t have to know the result if you know the rules – and the initial state.

Information is not something esoteric far beyond physics, is not something complex only manageable by difficult mathematics.

It is basic.

And it is dynamic.