Trying to model nature: Nature has evolved new molecular function by creating diverse collections of chemical structures and selecting for molecules with desired biological properties. An example of this is the recombination of germ-line genes for the formation of antibodies with refined specificities (see scheme). Chemists, biologists, and physicists are now employing this combinatorial approach with great success to generate molecules with properties never before observed in nature or in the laboratory.
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Liu et al. (1999) studied this question.