![]() ![]() Faustino, of Johns Hopkins Mikhail Makarov, Alma C. This research is supported by the Human Frontier Science Program grant HFSP-RGY0074/2019 and the NIH Director's New Innovator Award (DP2-GM140926). "Maybe if we found life on a different planet, it wouldn't be that different." "The universe seems to love amino acids," Fried said. That's why Fried thinks the new research could also have implications for the possibility of finding life beyond Earth. Scientists have spotted amino acids in asteroids far from Earth, suggesting those compounds are ubiquitous in other corners of the universe. "Our research shows that nature could have selected for building blocks with useful properties before Darwinian evolution." But replicating DNA also requires proteins, so we have a chicken-and-egg problem," Fried said. ![]() "To have evolution in the Darwinian sense, you need to have this whole sophisticated way of turning genetic molecules like DNA and RNA into proteins. The new research offers new clues into the mystery of what happened during the time in between. Scientists estimate Earth is 4.6 billion years old, and that DNA, proteins, and other molecules didn't begin to form simple organisms until 3.8 billion years ago. "Were they selected for any particular reason?" "We're trying to find out what was so special about our canonical amino acids," Fried said. How the rest came to be is an open question that Fried's team is trying to answer with the new research, especially because those space rocks brought much more than the "modern" amino acids. ![]() Others arrived via special delivery by meteorites, which introduced a mixed bag of ingredients that helped life on Earth complete a set of 10 "early" amino acids. In its first billion years, Earth's atmosphere consisted of an assortment of gases like ammonia and carbon dioxide that reacted with high levels of ultraviolet radiation to concoct some of the simpler canonical amino acids. Fried calls those compounds "canonical." But science has struggled to pinpoint what's so special-if anything-about those 20 amino acids. "You could have evolution before you had biology, you could have natural selection for the chemicals that are useful for life even before there was DNA."Įven though the primordial Earth had hundreds of amino acids, all living things use the same 20 of these compounds. "Protein folding was basically allowing us to do evolution before there was even life on our planet," Fried said. In other words, life thrived on Earth not just because some amino acids were available and easy to make in ancient habitats but because some of them were especially good at helping proteins adopt specific shapes to perform crucial functions. They found ancient organic compounds integrated the amino acids best suited for protein folding into their biochemistry. In the lab, the researchers mimicked primordial protein synthesis of 4 billion years ago by using an alternative set of amino acids that were highly abundant before life arose on Earth. The findings are newly published in the Journal of the American Chemical Society.
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