Thanks about my daughter, but this little tigress was sophomore princess at Homecoming, Senior Princess at the Sr. Ball, and voted class clown. She can't take a bad picture, is a people magnet, and can look at you sideways along with a one-liner that leaves you helplessly in tears laughing. All five our our adopted children have some kind of handicap and, with the exception of our youngest son who contracted encephalitis after we got him (he is 20, autistic and profoundly retarded today, but with a healthy enough body that we lock the fridge! He backwashes in the milk....LOL), all have done a superb job growing up and coming to their own. Life hasn't been boring!
In the meantime, altering a protein means, to the best of my knowledge, simply that we are talking about a folding alteration, not an amino acid change. We are still not sure how proteins 'know' how to fold, are we? (rhetorical). What I have learned from those working in the field of microbiology and genetics, however, is that no cell has ever been seen to make a protein which is new to it. I assume you know this is referred to as a 'de novo' protein. A protein which is made according to a pre-established pattern in the cell is not de novo, whether or not it folds properly. In addition, most proteins are disassembled by the cell rather frequently and the amino acids used to construct fresh proteins.
But where is the cell that has constructed a protein different in basic amino acid sequence (structure) from the proteins it has previously made. And if I am behind in my knowledge here and that has happened and been witnessed, what did the cell do with this new protein?
That part is not rhetorical. If you know of something here, I would be very curious to know and have the reference. Thank you.