IMAGE: How could life have evolved before there was a genetic code? Chicken or egg conundrum of biomolecular proportions. view more
Credit: UNC-Chapel Hill
CHAPEL HILL, NC – About four billion years ago, life arose from primordial chemical sap. Somehow, amino acids were linked together to form proteins, and from these proteins, the basic molecules in biological life took root, leading so slowly to the beginning of life as we know it. . But how? How did the chaos of chemicals become the ordered biology?
Scientists at UNC-Chapel Hill aim to answer this question by continuing their knowledge, collaborative spirit, and a prestigious $ 1-million award from the WM Keck Foundation, a love organization Los Angeles-based human beings who support important discoveries in science, engineering, and medicine. They also hope to contribute to our understanding of important cellular processes to open new avenues for disease detection and treatment strategies.
The principal investigator of this project is Charles Carter, PhD, professor in the UNC Department of Biochemistry and Biophysics at the UNC School of Medicine. For many years, it has been conducting progressive research in this area, and this is one of the reasons why the Keck Foundation has funded this innovative collaboration. During his efforts to reveal more about how biology was born from chemistry, Carter reached out to a pair of colleagues in Carolina – RNA biology expert Qi Zhang, PhD, associate professor in the UNC Department of Biochemistry and Biophysics, and Abigail Knight, PhD, an assistant professor in the UNC Department of Chemistry at the UNC College of Arts and Sciences that aims to mimic proteins with synthetic polymers. The team also recruited for the project Hiroaki Suga, PhD, professor of organic chemistry at the University of Tokyo.
These four scientists have developed a collaborative strategy to test hypotheses for how tiny chemicals end up establishing how biochemistry became fundamentally together, according to genetic code four billion years ago.
“At the establishment stage, all living things depend on their ability to convert information stored in genes into action enzymes, or proteins,” Carter said. “This is called translation, and scientists have usually understood this process for a long time. But there are specific details about how this may have happened for the first time. at the beginning of life has escaped the attention of the scientific community. “
Understanding the details of this process will allow scientists to better explore the potential of extraterrestrial life. It could inspire new strategies for imitating cell components and complex processes that are important for human health. It will generate a useful public database for the field of synthetic biology, containing many research applications in medicine, manufacturing, and agriculture. Overall, this project will help answer perpetual questions that arose after Crick and Watson discovered the DNA double helix. Their progressive work has shown how information in genes is stored and passed on from one generation to the next. But ever since the 1960s, how cells use that information has been at the heart of so many research questions related to nature, human health, and disease pathology.
“Our project is the first to try to understand how certain parts of the translation process happened in the first place,” Carter said. “It has the potential to understand what nature has allowed. make the same protein each time according to the transformative genetic code. We seek to answer a deep and challenging question. “
Carter has been working on part of this complex biochemical puzzle for more than a decade, but it has been difficult to figure out how specific pieces of the translation puzzle might work. occurred before the repetitive memory that evolved. For example, what is the exact chemical mechanism that accelerated the translation of DNA into the short – linked protein bonds between amino acids specified by code, and what must have happened for life to emerge?
“Basically, chemistry is random; it’s random,” Zhang said. “We can think of a chemistry that existed before life appeared on Earth, the so-called primordial soup. But biology is not chaotic or random. It is prescriptive.”
Knight said, “Through this project, we will develop a platform to help us study and understand the random chemical process that led to a non-random life.”
The scientists are focusing on one part of the translational machinery known today as the ribosome – tiny RNA and related proteins that bind amino acids together in a specific order that is specification with guidance in a gene. Amino acid chains, or polypeptides, need to fold into active proteins, which direct biological functions that differentiate heart cells from lung cells, for example. To fold the same method each time, the amino acid sequences must be the same, which occurs due to genetic coding.
When you think of life emerging for the first time billions of years ago, it is the binding of amino acids that needed to happen just for order biology to emerge from random chemistry.
However, in our current cells, the ribosomes have developed a kind of “memory” to harness the power of the genetic code. And that memory came from the creation of biology before, before cells were created. In the beginning of life, there were no cells and there could not be a ribosome like we have now. So what was it? Well, there could be triple sequences of DNA and RNA, and these triplets called codons and anticodons might be able to align perfectly and stimulate “Amino acids” to form peptide bonds. And from that time of stress, life would be fundamentally possible. This, in short, is what Carolina scientists hope to prove.
“Through our experiments, we aim to generate a lot of data about this biochemical process,” Zhang said. “Because when life begins, there’s a lot of chaos that gradually comes into order. We plan to keep an eye on what may have happened.”
Carter said, “We are extremely grateful to the WM Keck Foundation for supporting this innovative project, and we are confident that our work will shed light on the origins of life on Earth and open the door to ‘answers many other research questions related to our current times. . “
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To read more about this project, check out the scientific summary at the WM Keck Foundation website.
Based in Los Angeles, the WM Keck Foundation was founded in 1954 by the late WM Keck, founder of the Superior Oil Company. The Foundation’s grants focus specifically on positive efforts in the areas of medical and scientific research and engineering. The Foundation also maintains a Southern California Grant Program that supports the Los Angeles community, with a particular focus on children and youth. For more information, visit http: // www.