ENST: Some Proteins Act Almost Like Humans

Molecular machines are so accurate,
they seem downright sentient

This article by CEH editor David Coppedge was published anonymously at Evolution News & Science Today in 2018.

Some Proteins Act Almost Like Humans
Evolution News & Science Today
January 2, 2018

If you watched a well-designed humanoid robot like Star Trek’s Lieutenant Commander Data, you might be excused for thinking it (he?) was a real human. (Of course, Brent Spiner, the actor who played him, is.) With the right programming, a machine could pass the Turing test, fooling an observer into attributing sentience to it. But we don’t have to wait centuries for engineering to catch up with Star Trek. In our own bodies, there are proteins that get pretty close.

The Drum Major

Meet Daple, a protein in the inner ear. Those of us whose ears work properly can thank Daple for doing a good job when we were developing in the womb. Deep inside the cochlea of our inner ear, the robot-like Daple was guiding the construction of hair cell bundles, those important antennas that pick up fluid motions and transduce them into electrical impulses in the auditory nerve. Arranged like organ pipes, each hair cell bundle must line up properly to function. The individual hair cells have an assistant protein that puts them in their correct relative position, and another set of proteins controls the axis they need to line up on, but what brings these two functions together?

Until now, scientists did not know how these independent processes were coordinated. We can imagine the confusion of a marching band at half time without a drum major. Who directs the trumpets to go left and the tubas to go right? Who signals when things need to happen? The drum major has been found, a new paper reports in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), and its name is — you guessed it — Daple….

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