clark ellis

Thank you. So let me check my understanding first. We eat food, and our digestive enzymes (which are produced and released from cells) break down that food and turn it into useful things like amino acids. Those amino acids then find their way into cells where they are joined together into proteins (or enzymes as above, but lots of other types too like antibodies and hormones) by our DNA being expressed. The sequence of amino acids dictates what protein is produced. And folding is important I understand, but what is dictating that folding? Folding aside for a moment, in theory then, synthetic messenger rna could be introduced, taken to a cell and translated to build whatever you wanted? Completely bypassing the cells chromosomal dna? If that's right then I'm interested in how you would actually get that messenger rna into cells - is that basically what bacteria and viruses do? If so, then they could be used as delivery methods? How do we actually know this stuff, can we actually see inside cells currently to see all this taking place?

I don't want to write a crappy book - but its been a while since I was at school - so I'm trying to fill in some gaps in my knowledge. If I posted some questions here, would people be able to explain a few things to me? Here is an example question: In the future, might it be possible to somehow instruct things in the blood or in cells, proteins and molecules, to break down into chemical elements and smaller compounds and then reconstruct in a different way, into potentially, a whole bunch of different stuff? thanks Clark