Washington - January 23 ANI - Researchers discovered the structures of proteins that could be responsible for the origins of life in the primordial soup of the ancient Earth during a recent study.
The researchers explored how primitive life may have originated on our planet from simple, non-living materials. They asked what properties define life as we know it and concluded that anything alive would have to collect and use energy from sources such as the Sun or hydrothermal vents.
This would mean that the ability to shuffle electrons was essential to life. The researchers decided to investigate the combination of the two proteins that bind metals, because the best elements for electron transfer are metals think standard electrical wires and most biological activities are carried out by proteins.
They compared all existing protein structures that bind metals to establish common features, based on the premise that these shared features were present in ancestral proteins and were diversified and passed down to create the range of proteins we see today.
The researchers found that the vast majority of currently existing metal binding proteins are somewhat similar regardless of the type of metal they bind to, the organism they come from or the function assigned to the protein as a whole, because of the evolution of protein structures.
The findings showed that the metal-binding cores of existing proteins are similar even though the proteins themselves may not be, said Yana Bromberg, professor at Rutgers University-New Brunswick.
We also saw that these metal-binding cores are often made of repeated substructures, kind of like LEGO blocks. These blocks were also found in other proteins, not just metal binding cores, and in many other proteins that were not considered in our study, according to Bromberg.
Bromberg noted that rearrangements of these little building blocks may have had a single or a small number of common ancestors and given rise to the whole range of proteins and functions that are currently available, that is, to life as we know it.
Bromberg said that we have very little information about how life evolved on this planet, and that our work contributes to a previously unavailable explanation.
This explanation could potentially contribute to our search for life on other planets and planets. Bromberg said that our finding of the specific structural building blocks could be relevant for synthetic biology efforts, where scientists aim to construct specifically active proteins anew.