In transcriptional regulation, you often find that positive signals proceed by inhibiting or destroying a protein that is in turn inhibiting or destroying the effector protein. This can be seen in the retinoblastoma - E2F signalling pathway, and many others. I was wondering if there was any direct biological utility, and if so what this utility was.
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2$\begingroup$ You might be interested in reading Uri Alon's take on network motifs: doi.org/10.1038/nrg2102 $\endgroup$– J--Dec 5, 2018 at 18:19
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1$\begingroup$ This reminds me, somehow, of the Dining Philosophers Problem, which is about avoiding deadlock in distributed systems. $\endgroup$– jlawlerMay 4, 2019 at 20:09
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This feels like a my philosophical question...
Direct regulation of proteins would have to have biological utility - such a gene has to be driven by positive selection to adapt that ability. The question is more about learning what might be driving its role.
I would hazard that protein deactivation and degradation would be important to make sure that these inhibitors could be down-regulated fast enough - if they were left to degrade via a general pathway, the specific signal would not be available for too long a time.
