proteins
Douglas Axe chapter excerpt: Can proteins evolve?
Another Biology Big Bang: Pervasive proteins demonstrate intelligent design
Science discovery: The non-existence of harmful proteins
Of 70,000 hitherto unknown viruses in the human gut, over 40% of proteins had no clear function
Film clip on the probability of a protein forming by chance passes 500k views
Flap over use of term “intelligent design” in PNAS paper
Protein found inside a meteorite
Large and giant virus proteins not linked to any known virus lineage
Will setting proteins to music help us understand them?
Nobody went downhill faster than DNA
Researchers propose computer model of protein that may have existed when life began
At Rutgers: How did life arise on Earth? Rutgers researchers have found among the first and perhaps only hard evidence that simple protein catalysts – essential for cells, the building blocks of life, to function – may have existed when life began. Their study of a primordial peptide, or short protein, is published in the Journal of the American Chemical Society. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, the chemist Günter Wächtershäuser postulated that life began on iron- and sulfur-containing rocks in the ocean. Wächtershäuser 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’ Robert Wood Johnson Medical School. Human DNA Read More ›
Decidedly unDarwinian admissions re proteins
Philip Cunningham writes to note for us such moments in the literature: Abstract: (open access) Why life persists at the edge of chaos is a question at the very heart of evolution. Here we show that molecules taking part in biochemical processes from small molecules to proteins are critical quantum mechanically. Electronic Hamiltonians of biomolecules are tuned exactly to the critical point of the metal-insulator transition separating the Anderson localized insulator phase from the conducting disordered metal phase. Using tools from Random Matrix Theory we confirm that the energy level statistics of these biomolecules show the universal transitional distribution of the metal-insulator critical point and the wave functions are multifractals in accordance with the theory of Anderson transitions. The findings Read More ›