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For: Real America News Updated 17 Jan 2022, 18: 02 pm EST
A team of researchers from Rutgers University and the University of Buenos Aires identified the structures of proteins that could be responsible for the origins of life on Earth, according to a study published in the journal Science Advances.
The researchers, led by Yana Bromberg, a professor in the Department of Biochemistry and Microbiology at Rutgers University-New Brunswick, studied how primitive life could originate on our planet from simple and non-living materials.
As a starting point for the study, scientists determined the properties that define life and concluded that everything that was alive needed to collect and use energy from sources such as the Sun or hydrothermal vents.
Study the pro metal-binding theines
To collect this energy, organisms would have had to be able to transfer electrons. And, as explained in a statement from Given that the best elements for electron transfer are metals and that most biological activities are carried out by proteins, the researchers decided to explore the combination of both, that is, proteins that bind to metals.
The team thus tried to find similarities between all known protein structures that bind to metals, assuming that these similarities would have been found in the first proteins and would have finally passed to the range of proteins that currently exist.
Similar structures: “like LEGO blocks”
By means of a computational model, scientists found that the vast majority of currently existing metal-binding proteins are somewhat similar, regardless of the type of metal to which they are attached, the organism they come from or the functionality assigned to the protein as a whole.
“We saw that the metal-binding cores of existing proteins are really similar, even though the proteins themselves are not,” Bromberg said, adding that the structures of metal-binding proteins were “often made up of repeating substructures”, similar to LEGO blocks.
“Interestingly, these blocks were also found in other regions of the proteins, not only in the metal-binding nuclei, and in many other proteins that were not taken into account in our study”, he added.
Building blocks: a single or a small number of common ancestors
Bromberg, whose research focuses on deciphering the DNA blueprints of the molecular machinery of life, suggests that the rearrangements of these small building blocks may have had a single or a small number of common ancestors. This means that repeated substructures, or “LEGO” blocks, could have given rise to the full range of proteins and their functions that exist today. “That is, life as we know it,” said Bromberg.
The findings of the study, funded by NASA, contribute to an explanation “until now non-existent” of how life began on Earth and could even, according to Bromberg, help in the search for extraterrestrial organisms and in the field of synthetic biology.
(With DW information)
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