The abundance of symmetry in biological forms begs the question of whether symmetric designs provide an advantage. Any engineer would tell you that they do. Symmetry is crucial to designing modular, robust parts that can be comb...

Life is marked by symmetrical structures, from the arms of a starfish to the identical subunits of various proteins. Why this is the case is not understood. One hypothesis is that symmetrical structures are easier to encode and, hence, are likelier to evolve. It is possible that evolution acts as...

Protein subunits attach to each other via interface surfaces to form complex structures. The greater the number of possible interfaces, the more complex a protein is. When the researchers looked at existing structures in the Protein Data Bank, they noticed that most proteins had few interfaces. O...