Origin-of-Life Story May Have Found Its Missing Link

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JimF
Posts: 651
Joined: Thu Jan 21, 2010 2:03 pm

Origin-of-Life Story May Have Found Its Missing Link

Post by JimF »

In the other study, Wolfenden and colleagues tested the way proteins fold in response to temperature, since life somehow arose from a proverbial boiling pot of chemicals on early Earth. They looked at life's building blocks, amino acids, and how they distribute in water and oil — a quality called hydrophobicity. They found that the amino acids' relationships were consistent even at high temperatures — the shape, size and polarity of the amino acids are what mattered when they strung together to form proteins, which have particular structures.

"What we're asking here is, 'Would the rules of folding have been different?'" Wolfenden said. At higher temperatures, some chemical relationships change because there is more thermal energy. But that wasn't the case here.
http://news.yahoo.com/origin-life-story ... 19318.html
VijayPande
Pande Group Member
Posts: 2058
Joined: Fri Nov 30, 2007 6:25 am
Location: Stanford

Re: Origin-of-Life Story May Have Found Its Missing Link

Post by VijayPande »

Yes, it’s an interesting set of points he makes.
Prof. Vijay Pande, PhD
Departments of Chemistry, Structural Biology, and Computer Science
Chair, Biophysics
Director, Folding@home Distributed Computing Project
Stanford University
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