{"id":213928,"date":"2025-05-13T22:04:00","date_gmt":"2025-05-14T03:04:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2025\/05\/protein-problem-researchers-challenge-fundamental-assumption-in-evolutionary-biochemistry"},"modified":"2025-05-13T22:04:00","modified_gmt":"2025-05-14T03:04:00","slug":"protein-problem-researchers-challenge-fundamental-assumption-in-evolutionary-biochemistry","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2025\/05\/protein-problem-researchers-challenge-fundamental-assumption-in-evolutionary-biochemistry","title":{"rendered":"Protein problem: Researchers challenge fundamental assumption in evolutionary biochemistry"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a class=\"aligncenter blog-photo\" href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog.images\/protein-problem-researchers-challenge-fundamental-assumption-in-evolutionary-biochemistry2.jpg\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>How did life originate? Ancient proteins may hold important clues. Every organism on Earth is made up of proteins. Although all organisms\u2014even single-celled ones\u2014have complex protein structures now, this wasn\u2019t always the case.<\/p>\n<p>For years, evolutionary biochemists assumed that most <a href=\"https:\/\/phys.org\/tags\/ancient+proteins\/\" rel=\"tag\" class=\"\">ancient proteins<\/a> emerged from a simple signature, called a motif. However, new research suggests that this motif, without the surrounding protein, isn\u2019t as consequential as it seemed. The study is <a href=\"https:\/\/academic.oup.com\/mbe\/article\/doi\/10.1093\/molbev\/msaf055\/8071345\" target=\"_blank\">published<\/a> in the journal Molecular Biology and Evolution.<\/p>\n<p>The international team of researchers was led by Lynn Kamerlin, a professor in the Georgia Tech School of Chemistry and Biochemistry and Georgia Research Alliance Vasser Woolley Chair in Molecular Design, and Liam Longo, a specially appointed associate professor at the Earth-Life Science Institute at the Institute of Science Tokyo, in Japan.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>How did life originate? Ancient proteins may hold important clues. Every organism on Earth is made up of proteins. Although all organisms\u2014even single-celled ones\u2014have complex protein structures now, this wasn\u2019t always the case. For years, evolutionary biochemists assumed that most ancient proteins emerged from a simple signature, called a motif. However, new research suggests that [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":661,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3,19,385],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-213928","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-biological","category-chemistry","category-evolution"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/213928","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/661"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=213928"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/213928\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=213928"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=213928"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=213928"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}