If you enjoy Legos as a child (or still do as an adult), you may find it interesting that researchers at Rutgers University in New Jersey have discovered that certain proteins appear to consist of regular chunks that fit together pretty much like Legos. They have nicknamed these protein chunks “Legos of life.”
The idea behind this research was to see if it was possible to determine what ancient proteins looked like, from the very beginning of life, billions of years ago, when its likely that proteins were simpler than they are now. This can’t be done directly because such organic remains of organisms decay. Further, evolution has likely erased the genes for these original proteins in modern organisms.
The particular types of proteins they’re looking at are proteins that generally catalyze electron-transfer reactions. Such proteins contain a transition metal cation (copper, iron, cobalt or something similar) at the reaction center. It is believed that these were the sorts of proteins most useful to what are believed to be the first living creatures on earth, microorganisms that lived near hydrothermal vents at the bottom of the ocean.
The researchers studied the structures of nearly 10,000 such proteins looking for common peptide sequences and structures, and doing so, they found evidence for 4 distinct structural pieces, consisting of 60 to 100 amino acids, that made up any number of these proteins. These four pieces fit together as though they were Legos, hence the “Legos for life.” The researchers believe these four chunks could be the primordial proteins from which, ultimately, all life eventually evolved:
"We don't have a fossil record of what proteins looked like 4 billion years ago, so we have to take what we have today and start walking backwards, trying to imagine what these proteins looked like," said Vikas Nanda, senior author of the study and an associate professor in the Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology at Rutgers' Robert Wood Johnson Medical School, within Rutgers Biomedical and Health Sciences. "The study is the first time we've been able to take something with thousands of amino acids and break it down into reasonable chunks that could have had primordial origins."
Recognizing these interlocking chunks, it may be possible to rearrange them in novel ways to make them perform non-biological reactions that could improve the quality of our lives:
“Understanding these parts and how they are connected to each other within the existing proteins could help us understand how to design new catalysts that could potentially split water, fix nitrogen or do other things that are really important for society,” said Paul G. Falkowski, study co-author and a distinguished professor who leads the Environmental Biophysics and Molecular Ecology Laboratory at Rutgers University-New Brunswick.
Interesting stuff. I’m sure that the inventors of Legos had no idea that they were imitating life when they came up with their ever-popular construction toy, but it’s not unusual for a good idea to be utilized more than once independently.
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From MikeTheLiberal:
On this Groundhog Day (which please don’t let it repeat forever), I’m recommending a Tweet from Beto O’Rourke that First Amendment posted in his own diary because that tweet needs to be read by everyone as much as possible, and deserves to be retweeted until America realizes it’s under attack, and it’s not from foreign enemies.
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