origins of life tagged posts

Origin of Life: Which Came First?

Proteins with primitive arginine-based proteins (right) might have been capable of self-assembly and phase separation to create cell-like droplets

An experiment in recreating primordial proteins solves a long-standing riddle. What did the very first proteins look like — those that appeared on Earth around 3.7 billion years ago? Prof. Dan Tawfik of the Weizmann Institute of Science and Prof. Norman Metanis of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem have reconstructed protein sequences that may well resemble those ancestors of modern proteins, and their research suggests a way that these primitive proteins could have progressed to forming living cells. Their findings were published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).

The proteins encoded in a cell’s genet...

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