New Findings About Abiobenesis

[EdEarl]

From SciTechDaily

 

Our genetic code is translated by two super-families of modern-day enzymes. Carter’s research team created and superimposed digital three-dimensional versions of the two super-families to see how their structures aligned. Carter found that all the enzymes have virtually identical cores that can be extracted to produce “molecular fossils” he calls Urzymes — Ur meaning earliest or original. The other parts, he said, are variations that were introduced later, as evolution unfolded.

 

These two Urzymes are as close as scientists have gotten to the actual ancient enzymes that would have populated the Earth billions of years ago.

 

“Once we identified the core part of the enzyme, we cloned it and expressed it,” Carter said. “Then we wanted to see if we could stabilize it and determine if it had any biochemical activity.” They could and it did.

 

Both Urzymes are very good at accelerating the two reactions necessary to translate the genetic code.

“Our results suggest that there were very active protein enzymes very early in the generation of life, before there were organisms,” Carter said. “And those enzymes were very much like the Urzymes we’ve made.”

This research seems to be a step toward understanding abiogenesis, and one that points in a direction not previously investigated. Will this information lead to further progress, or to another difficult road block?

[Ophiolite]

I have long felt that the problem with how abiogenesis is presented in the popular science media and to a significant degree by researchers in journal articles is that the depth of our ignorance is ignored, or at best grossly understated, and the depth of our understanding of mechanisms is greatly exagerrated. There are some very large gaps that have to be filled in. Research of this type is exactly the ind of painstaking effort that will bre required to, eventually, come up with a high probaility solution.

[CharonY]

From my point of view abiogenesis per se is not a fundable and as such oftentimes information that may illuminate our knowledge gaps tend to be byproducts of other research.

I think it got a bit of a boost recently with research in the area of synthetic biology and protein evolution together with improved structure analysis tools at our hands. I would be kind of surprised if there were a lot of specialists claiming that we know a lot (or anything) about abiogenesis. But I guess it depends on the specific (sub-)discipline one gets into contact with.

[iRNAblogger]

I just have a quick question. What type of enzymes were the urzyme descendants? It says here that the enzymes "translated" the genetic code. This claim, semantically, refers to the process of translation, which is not catalyzed by protein enzymes. It could, I guess, be referring to transcription, which in the public sphere might be better understood as the act of "translating," which would make more sense because it is catalyzed by a protein enzyme.

 

Also, just to play devil's advocate a little, I didn't think that the RNA world hypothesis claimed that life was exclusively RNA-based... (maybe I was just making that up). I always assumed that the RNA world hypothesis did not exclude proteins, but rather that it simply suggested that A major catalytic molecule (not the only one) at the time might have been RNA. But I guess I had always assumed that the fact that RNA catalyzes protein synthesis indicated the possibility that both were hypothetically part of the ancient world.