{"id":82218,"date":"2018-08-30T22:42:26","date_gmt":"2018-08-31T05:42:26","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2018\/08\/scientists-identify-protein-that-may-have-existed-when-life-began"},"modified":"2018-08-30T22:42:26","modified_gmt":"2018-08-31T05:42:26","slug":"scientists-identify-protein-that-may-have-existed-when-life-began","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2018\/08\/scientists-identify-protein-that-may-have-existed-when-life-began","title":{"rendered":"Scientists identify protein that may have existed when life began"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a class=\"aligncenter blog-photo\" href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog.images\/scientists-identify-protein-that-may-have-existed-when-life-began2.jpg\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>How did life arise on Earth? Rutgers researchers have found among the first and perhaps only hard evidence that simple protein catalysts\u2014essential for cells, the building blocks of life, to function\u2014may have existed when life began.<\/p>\n<p>Their study of a primordial peptide, or short <a href=\"https:\/\/phys.org\/tags\/protein\/\" rel=\"tag\" class=\"\">protein<\/a>, is published in the Journal of the American Chemical Society.<\/p>\n<p>In the late 1980s and early 1990s, the chemist G\u00fcnter W\u00e4chtersh\u00e4user postulated that life began on iron- and sulfur-containing rocks in the ocean. W\u00e4chtersh\u00e4user and others predicted that short peptides would have bound metals and served as catalysts of life-producing chemistry, according to study co-author Vikas Nanda, an associate professor at Rutgers\u2019 Robert Wood Johnson Medical School.<\/p>\n<p><!-- Link: <a href=\"https:\/\/phys.org\/news\/2018-08-scientists-protein-life-began.html\">https:\/\/phys.org\/news\/2018&#45;08-scientists-protein-life-began.html<\/a> --><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>How did life arise on Earth? Rutgers researchers have found among the first and perhaps only hard evidence that simple protein catalysts\u2014essential for cells, the building blocks of life, to function\u2014may have existed when life began. Their study of a primordial peptide, or short protein, is published in the Journal of the American Chemical Society. [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":396,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[19],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-82218","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-chemistry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/82218","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\/396"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=82218"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/82218\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=82218"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=82218"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=82218"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}