ArticleOrigins of life and evolution of the biosphere : the journal of the International Society for the Study of the Origin of Life2011
Molecular evolution of aminoacyl tRNA synthetase proteins in the early history of life.
Article in Origins of life and evolution of the biosphere : the journal of the International Society for the Study of the Origin of Life, 2011. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. An erratum has been issued. Cited by 42 papers.
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42 citing papers in PubMed, 73 citations in OpenAlex.
- Resurrecting tRNAs of the Last Universal Common Ancestor (Commonote) Toward Rebuilding the Ancient Translation System.Journal of molecular evolution · 2026Article
- The Emergence of Life in the Light of Evolution.ArXiv · 2026Article
- The selfish ribosome.PLoS biology · 2026Article
- Universal paralogs provide a window into evolution before the last universal common ancestor.Cell genomics · 2026Review
- The selfish ribosome.ArXiv · 2026Article
- A new LUCApedia database for data-driven research on early evolutionary history.Bioinformatics advances · 2026Article
- Reduced Amino Acid Substitution Matrices Find Traces of Ancient Coding Alphabets in Modern Day Proteins.Molecular biology and evolution · 2025Article
- Structural Enzymology, Phylogenetics, Differentiation, and Symbolic Reflexivity at the Dawn of Biology.Genome biology and evolution · 2025Article
- Order of amino acid recruitment into the genetic code resolved by last universal common ancestor's protein domains.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2024Article
- Order of amino acid recruitment into the genetic code resolved by Last Universal Common Ancestor's protein domains.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2024Article
- The Last Universal Common Ancestor of Ribosome-Encoding Organisms: Portrait of LUCA.Journal of molecular evolution · 2024Review
- On the Nature of the Last Common Ancestor: A Story from its Translation Machinery.Journal of molecular evolution · 2024Review
- Base Pairing Promoted the Self-Organization of Genetic Coding, Catalysis, and Free-Energy Transduction.Life (Basel, Switzerland) · 2024Review
- Enzymic recognition of amino acids drove the evolution of primordial genetic codes.Nucleic acids research · 2024Article
- Symmetrical distributions of aminoacyl-tRNA synthetases during the evolution of the genetic code.Theory in biosciences = Theorie in den Biowissenschaften · 2023Article
- Electron transport chains as a window into the earliest stages of evolution.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2023Article
- Early divergence of translation initiation and elongation factors.Protein science : a publication of the Protein Society · 2022Article
- Frontiers in Prebiotic Chemistry and Early Earth Environments.Origins of life and evolution of the biosphere : the journal of the International Society for the Study of the Origin of Life · 2022Article
- A consensus view of the proteome of the last universal common ancestor.Ecology and evolution · 2022Article
- Emergent properties as by-products of prebiotic evolution of aminoacylation ribozymes.Nature communications · 2022Article
Corrections and comments
- Erratum issued
Authors and funding
4 authors at 3 institutions in 1 country.
Funding
Abstract
Aminoacyl-tRNA synthetases (aaRS) consist of several families of functionally conserved proteins essential for translation and protein synthesis. Like nearly all components of the translation machinery, most aaRS families are universally distributed across cellular life, being inherited from the time of the Last Universal Common Ancestor (LUCA). However, unlike the rest of the translation machinery, aaRS have undergone numerous ancient horizontal gene transfers, with several independent events detected between domains, and some possibly involving lineages diverging before the time of LUCA. These transfers reveal the complexity of molecular evolution at this early time, and the chimeric nature of genomes within cells that gave rise to the major domains. Additionally, given the role of these protein families in defining the amino acids used for protein synthesis, sequence reconstruction of their pre-LUCA ancestors can reveal the evolutionary processes at work in the origin of the genetic code. In particular, sequence reconstructions of the paralog ancestors of isoleucyl- and valyl- RS provide strong empirical evidence that at least for this divergence, the genetic code did not co-evolve with the aaRSs; rather, both amino acids were already part of the genetic code before their cognate aaRSs diverged from their common ancestor. The implications of this observation for the early evolution of RNA-directed protein biosynthesis are discussed.
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Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.