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13-Mar-2026
In March, Harald Schwalbe (Professor at Goethe University Frankfurt and Director of Instruct-ERIC) and colleagues from Frankfurt including the philosopher Thomas Schimmer published a review in the journal “Angewandte Chemie International Edition”.
The review, entitled “The Role of Chemistry Across Disciplines From Humanities to Life Sciences in Understanding Complexity and Emergence” discusses the role of chemical properties in evolution of life, from the existence of elements and molecules to the production of self-replicating nucleotides and finally the emergence of organisms and complex biological molecules.
The article is informed by a philosophical model, building on the work of philosophers such as Aristotle and Kant and applying their ideas to the question of how complex life arose from simple molecules.
The review also discusses the difficulties of predicting the structure of a protein based on its amino acid sequence alone. Until recently, it has been very difficult to predict protein structure, since the enormous number of possible conformations makes prediction very computationally expensive. However, the development of machine learning applications such as AlphaFold has made sequence-based prediction feasible, with AlphaFold currently providing access to over 200 million protein structure predictions. Find out more about AI and structural biology here.
The review emphasizes that after the prediction of protein 3D structure, the conformational dynamics of proteins and the coupling of translation synthesis rate and protein fold remain as open questions to understand cellular regulation. In other words, the kinetic aspects of cellular information transfer have become the new challenge.
