Darwin Day Webinar Premiered Molecular Machine Animation

The Discovery Institute hosted a Darwin Day webinar at 10:00 a.m. Sat Feb 12. It featured a new animation of a molecular machine.

For those who missed the webinar, it featured Casey Luskin of the Discovery Institute’s Center for Science and Culture, and Dr Joe Deweese, a biochemist at Freed-Hardeman University, who specializes in the structure and function of topoisomerase proteins in the cell. The webinar also premiered a new animation of Topoisomerase II, an irreducibly complex molecular machine found in all life forms.

Topoisomerases are a family of large proteins that untangle DNA. They are vital for solving situations during DNA replication when strands tend to coil and supercoil, a dangerous situation that can lead to cell death or cancer. Topoisomerase II, a supersize enzyme with 1400 amino acids and three major “gate” domains, is able to grab a supercoiled DNA strand, cleave it, untangle it and join the two ends back together.

The new animation of Topoisomerase II and how it works will be posted soon at the Discovery Institute’s YouTube Channel and also on IntelligentDesign.org. For now, read about it in this article at Evolution News. As you watch the multipart action of this enzyme, keep in mind something that Dr Deweese mentioned in the webinar: the enzyme does all this in a fraction of a second.

The timing of this premiere on Darwin Day, Casey Luskin says, is to remind viewers of Darwin’s challenge in the Origin of Species, where he said, “If it could be demonstrated that any complex organ existed, which could not possibly have been formed by numerous, successive, slight modifications, my theory would absolutely break down.”

Update: The animation has been posted at Evolution News on Feb 16th.