Our “digital world feeling” has indeed led us to reductionist, linear statements such as “under this condition, protein X becomes phosphorylated at site Y.” This leads to a simple schematic drawing, but does not consider that different copies of protein X may or may not carry the phosphate moiety at this position. We tend to write (and think) digitally, but our language might not be in line with our own physical reality that is profoundly analog. We moreover have a tendency to believe that there is only one mod-form, usually the maximally phosphorylated one, when, in reality, there is a
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