'Digging up' 4-billion-year-old fossil protein structures to reveal how they evolved

Thursday, August 8, 2013 - 12:00 in Biology & Nature

Very little is known about how and when over the course of evolution 3-D protein structures arose. In a new study, researchers resurrected four-billion-year-old Precambrian proteins in the laboratory and gained novel insights into protein evolution by analyzing their X-ray crystal structures. This method has revealed a remarkable degree of structural similarity among proteins since life first evolved on this planet, and represents a powerful and novel approach to explore the evolution of protein structures.

Read the whole article on Science Daily

More from Science Daily

Latest Science Newsletter

Get the latest and most popular science news articles of the week in your Inbox! It's free!

Check out our next project, Biology.Net