That number only grows exponentially larger when biologists attempt to calculate the number of possible ways of combining all the proteins and all the other large molecular components necessary for that one-celled organism, including the DNA and RNA molecules, ribosomes, lipids and glycolipid molecules, and others. The number of possible combinations of these cellular components (called the “interactome”) vastly exceeds the number of elementary particles in the universe (1080) and even the number of events since the big bang (10139).
