Posted on 08/16/2013 11:21:41 AM PDT by SeekAndFind
Researchers have reconstructed the structure of 4-billion-year-old proteins.
The primeval proteins, described today (Aug. 8) in the journal Structure, could reveal new insights about the origin of life, said study co-author José Manuel Sanchez Ruíz, a physical chemist at the University of Granada in Spain.
Exactly how life emerged on Earth more than 3 billion years ago is a mystery. Some scientists believe that lightning struck the primordial soup in ammonia-rich oceans, producing the complex molecules that formed the precursors to life. Others believe that chemical reactions at deep-sea hydrothermal vents gave rise to cell membranes and simple cellular pumps. Still others believe that space rocks brought the raw ingredients for life — or perhaps even life itself — to Earth.
But it's difficult to recreate events that happened so far in the distant past.
Sanchez Ruiz and his colleagues decided to study a class of proteins called thioredoxins, which perform dozens of cellular functions in organisms across all three domains of life: Archaea, Eukaryotes and Bacteria. The proteins' broad functionality and presence in all life forms suggests they have primordial roots, the researchers said.
The team analyzed all the differences between the versions of the proteins found in organisms in each domain, and mapped those differences to the dates when the organisms are believed to have diverged.
Using that information, they determined the likely amino acid sequence of the ancient thioredoxin proteins, which spawned all other versions and existed in the most primitive life.
They then recreated the protein in the lab. The "fossil" protein was incredibly stable, bound to many different chemicals and functioned well in a highly acidic environment.
"That makes a lot of sense because 4 billion years ago, many people think that the temperature was high and the oceans were acidic," Sanchez Ruíz told LiveScience.
(Excerpt) Read more at livescience.com ...
Isn’t this a bit like reconstructing the Indo-European language from modern languages without referring to anything written before 1066?
Not saying it can’t be done, but I’m not confident of the full fidelity of the results.
Can you make a stew out of it ?
“But it’s difficult to recreate events that happened so far in the distant past”.
You don’t say............really? It’s only four billion years, give or take a few million either way.
We will have all the answers when we die, much to the chagrin of the Darwinists...
“Some scientists believe that lightning struck the primordial soup in ammonia-rich oceans, producing the complex molecules that formed the precursors to life. Others believe that chemical reactions at deep-sea hydrothermal vents gave rise to cell membranes and simple cellular pumps”
Yeah, right. The massively sophisticated molecular machinery of single-cell organisms simply arose spontaneously as a functional unit after bombarding mud puddles with lightening for a few hundred million years.
Just like a Panasonic CF-53 laptop computer with Windows 7 would arise spontaneously if we filled a beaker full of the elemental powders from which it is formed, put some sea water in, and then bombarded the laptop soup in the beaker with lightening for a few hundred million years. Or maybe, we initially only get a chip to form in the beaker and the chip eventually EVOLVED all by itself into the laptop (with operating system) after being bombarded by cosmic rays for a long time.
Is recreating stuff from the past a good idea? All kinds of sci-fi scenerios come to mind.
How can anyone attempt to take this seriously? 4 billon years, really?
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