The origins of life: the primordial soup of the ancient Earth
A team of researchers has discovered the structures of proteins that may be responsible for the origins of life in the primordial soup of the ancient Earth.
They compared all the existing protein structures that bind metals to establish any common characteristics, based on the premise that these common characteristics were present in ancestral proteins and were diversified and transmitted to create the range of proteins we see today.
The evolution of protein structures involves understanding how new folds appeared in the previous ones, so the researchers devised a calculation method that found that the vast majority of proteins that bind existing metals are somewhat similar, regardless of the type of metal. which binds, to the organism to which it binds.
