New Evidence Points to the Origins of Life on Earth

First Posted: Jun 01, 2015 08:09 PM EDT
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New evidence may have emerged that may point scientists toward the origins of life. Researchers have discovered a bit more about the transition from building blocks into life that occurred 4 billion years ago.

"Our work shows that the close linkage between the physical properties of amino acids, the genetic code, and protein folding was likely essential from the beginning, long before large, sophisticated molecules arrived on the scene," said Charles Carter, one of the researchers, in a news release. "This close interaction was likely the key factor in the evolution from building blocks to organisms."

The scientific community recognizes that about 3.6 billion years ago, there existed the last universal common ancestor, otherwise known as LUCA, of all living things present on Earth. This single-celled organism had just a few hundred genes and already had completely blueprints for DNA replication, proteins synthesis, and RNA transcription. It had all of the basic components, such as lipids, that modern organisms have.

Before this time, though, there's no evidence of how LUCA emerged. Now, scientists examined the physical properties of twenty amino acids and found a link between these properties and the genetic code. This link suggested that there was a second, earlier code that made possible the peptide-RNA interactions necessary to launch a selection process that created the first life on Earth.

"Our experiments show how the polarities of amino acids change consistently across a wide range of temperatures in ways that would not disrupt the basic relationships between genetic coding and protein folding," said Richard Wolfenden, one of the researchers, in a news release.

This, in particular, was important to establish since when life was first forming on Earth, temperatures were hot, probably much hotter than they are now. The findings imply that the relationships between tRNA and the physical properties of amino acids-their sizes and polarities-were crucial during the Earth's primordial era.

The findings are published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

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