At the beginning of the new year, the "Science" sub-journal reported new discoveries on the origin of life on Earth

A Rutgers University-led research team has discovered the structure of a protein that may be linked to the origin of life in the primordial soup of ancient Earth, solving one of biology's deepest unanswered questions

The research was published in the journal Science Advances

Researchers have explored how primitive life on Earth arose from simple inanimate matter

From a molecular perspective, this means that the ability to move electrons is crucial to life

They compared all existing metal-binding protein structures to establish any common features that were present in ancestral proteins, diversified and inherited, creating the series we see today protein

The evolution of protein structure requires an understanding of how new folds arise from preexisting folds, so the researchers devised a computational approach that found that the vast majority of metal-binding proteins in existence today, regardless of which metal they bind Binding, are all somewhat similar, the organism they come from, or the function assigned to the protein as a whole

"We found that the metal-binding cores of existing proteins are indeed similar, although the proteins themselves may not be similar," said the study's lead author Yana Bromberg, a professor in the Department of Biochemistry and Microbiology at Rutgers University

"We know very little about how life arose on this planet, and our work provides a previously

The NASA-funded study also included researchers from the University of Buenos Aires

Magazine

Science Advances

Article Title

Quantifying structural relationships of metal-binding sites suggests origins of biological electron transfer