What does a hypercycle do? We said hypercycle links certain control units together to overcome error threshold, and secondly it solves the genotype/phenotype dichotomy. In other words you test your system at the phenotype and you must make sure that the phenotype tells the genotype, 'reproduce me'. And so, where could we find possibly a hypercycle? Well the best system again is a virus. In a virus, now... not a virus like Spiegelman did in vitro, that means in a test-tube, but the virus in vivo, in other words a virus infecting a host cell. And we took again our pet Q-beta, and Michael Gebinoga did this as a thesis.
What did he do? He took a coli culture and infected the coli culture with the phage, Q-beta, for certain amounts. This sample for one minute, the next sample for two minutes, up to forty minutes. After forty minutes the cells burst and about ten thousand viruses are sent out into the solution. So he did it... now he stopped the reaction when I said infected for one minute, it means he stops the reaction after a minute. Then he took these infected cells and he solved very carefully with phenol the outer membrane, the lipid membrane, and what is left is a ghost frame which can be penetrated by enzymes. And now he used these ghost cells and measured the kinetics using radioactive amino acids and radioactive building blocks for nucleic acids. He measured the protein synthesis and the nucleic acid synthesis. And then got the mechanism of it. And what came out are hypercyclic mechanism.
What does it mean? Well, I describe perhaps the mechanism of infection. Infection means one single nucleic acid molecule gets into the cell, through a pilus... the virus docks at such a pilus and injects its nucleic acid. Now you have one little nucleic acid molecule that is the virus genome in the host cell. The host cell has about ten to twenty thousand ribosomes, these are the machines which make protein synthesis. This little nucleic acid cannot reproduce, at least there are so many messenger molecules in the cells that it had no chance to reproduce. This virus has in its information the information for an enzyme which only replicates a virus, but for that you must translate, you must produce a phenotype of the enzyme. So what we found with our measurement, during the first ten minutes, only translation takes place. All these ribosomes in the cells, these protein factories, translate this one single molecule, one single RNA molecule.
