"Eppur si muove" (yet it moves)

Abstract

In the 17th century, the problem of the relative movement of the Earth with respect to the sun was an issue of central importance, and in fact, the man who has been considered responsible for the birth of modern science was committed to house arrest for defending the heliocentric hypothesis. Four centuries after the (never-confirmed) legend of Galileo Galilei's rebellious phrase, a problem of relative motion, now between the protein and substrate in enzyme catalyzed reactions, is once again a hot topic in the scientific community. In this regard, Warshel and coworkers’ study in PNAS (1) reports a very interesting study on the relationship between enzyme catalysis and protein conformational motions.