And it allows Dr Schneider to pretend he is a protein looking for a binding site.

ECONOMIST: How (and why) to find a needle in a haystack | The

The firm's researchers can produce billions of viruses, each with a different binding site from a human antibody.

ECONOMIST: Monoclonal antibodies

Biogen scientists crafted decoys by cloning and attaching the binding site of LFA-3 onto the Y-shaped tail of a harmless antibody.

FORBES: Skin Deep

To find out how much information is contained in an average binding site, just add up the information for each position.

ECONOMIST: How (and why) to find a needle in a haystack | The

Using some mathematical wizardry, he has taken the average information of a binding site, and worked backwards to evaluate any individual example.

ECONOMIST: How (and why) to find a needle in a haystack | The

And the trouble is, neither of the above approaches tells you much about any particular binding site that a protein may be looking for.

ECONOMIST: How (and why) to find a needle in a haystack | The

The only difference between the two types of cyclooxygenase is a small pocket that protrudes, like the thumb of a glove, from the main binding site.

FORBES: The Chemical Cobbler

For a genome of a given size, a binding site will have to be much more conspicuous if it is alone than if it is one of many.

ECONOMIST: How (and why) to find a needle in a haystack | The

But since some variation is permitted at most positions within a binding site, it means that the total number of different possible versions of a site is often large.

ECONOMIST: How (and why) to find a needle in a haystack | The

For instance, is the binding site just a rare variant, or does it contain mutations that have reduced the information so much that the protein can no longer recognise it?

ECONOMIST: How (and why) to find a needle in a haystack | The

It means that Dr Schneider can tell whether or not the signal from any particular binding site is too noisy to be useful in other words, whether it is a damaging mutation.

ECONOMIST: How (and why) to find a needle in a haystack | The

These work by binding chemically to that enzyme's active site to inhibit its action. (Protease cuts the raw chain of virus protein produced by a subverted cell into functional molecules.) However, the mechanism is not quite identical.

ECONOMIST: Nanotechnology in biology