Chiral Dislocations

The emerging concern of synthetic nucleotide that are inserted into DNA and especially RNA backbones is that of the “chiral dislocation.” Specifically, the chirality of the DNA and the (reverse chirality of the) RNA comes form the torsional stress on the nucleotide on the genetic backbone. In a natural nucleotide molecular bond to the backbone, the molecular structure of the molecules creates a torsional stress on the backbone, which tends to comply with the Newtonian Stationary Action Principle, where the manifold system of the backbone to the approximate center of the DNA nucleotide and the full length of the RNA nucleotide, creates a Laplacian, where there are no local minima. The chirality of the genetic backbone can then be calculated with a high degree of linearity and few — if any — dislocations, which would show as a “kink in the wire.”

When inserted into the RNA or DNA backbone, synthetic proteins need not follow this linear manifold, because energy is added to the system through the human engineering and synthetic process. The potential danger of these dislocations is that the surface energies of the dislocations can and do manifest below the Kelvin barrier for the protein molecules, which — like a prion — can lead to unintended effects on natural protein structures.

I tend to put a video at the end of these things, this one is amusing, but it shouldn’t detract from the real concerns of chiral dislocations which can result from a bunch of gung-ho genetic scientists who have about as much experience characterizing the smaller-than-Kelvin-barrier structures as they have in rebuilding a Fuji 488.