ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2013
Experimental evidence for the thermophilicity of ancestral life.
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2013. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 79 papers.
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79 citing papers in PubMed, 196 citations in OpenAlex.
- Bioinformatic assessment of the potential amyloidogenicity of the human and evolutionarily more ancient proteomes.The Biochemical journal · 2026Article
- Resurrecting tRNAs of the Last Universal Common Ancestor (Commonote) Toward Rebuilding the Ancient Translation System.Journal of molecular evolution · 2026Article
- Protein stability is determined by single-site bias rather than pairwise covariance.Nature chemical biology · 2026Article
- Thermostable ancestors enabled evolutionary diversification of promiscuous chemical defence enzymes.The EMBO journal · 2026Article
- Ancestral sequence reconstruction as a tool for structural analysis of modular polyketide synthases.Nature communications · 2025Article
- GArNet: A Genetic Algorithm-Based Protein Redesign Approach to Optimize Mutation Combinations Informed by Network Theory.Journal of chemical information and modeling · 2025Article
- Reconstruction of Ancestral Protein Sequences Using Autoregressive Generative Models.Molecular biology and evolution · 2025Article
- Recent advances on protein engineering for improved stability.Biodesign research · 2025Review
- Insights into the low-temperature adaptation of an enzyme as studied through ancestral sequence reconstruction.Protein science : a publication of the Protein Society · 2025Article
- Extreme thermal environments: reservoirs of industrially important thermozymes.Frontiers in microbiology · 2025Review
- Ancestral Sequence Reconstruction for Designing Biocatalysts and Investigating their Functional Mechanisms.JACS Au · 2024Review
- Ancestral Reconstruction and the Evolution of Protein Energy Landscapes.Annual review of biophysics · 2024Review
- The importance of input sequence set to consensus-derived proteins and their relationship to reconstructed ancestral proteins.Protein science : a publication of the Protein Society · 2024Article
- Hot springs viruses at Yellowstone National Park have ancient origins and are adapted to thermophilic hosts.Communications biology · 2024Article
- Extant Sequence Reconstruction: The Accuracy of Ancestral Sequence Reconstructions Evaluated by Extant Sequence Cross-Validation.Journal of molecular evolution · 2024Article
- Comparative analysis of reconstructed ancestral proteins with their extant counterparts suggests primitive life had an alkaline habitat.Scientific reports · 2024Article
- Characterization of a Novel Thermostable 7α-Hydroxysteroid Dehydrogenase.Protein and peptide letters · 2024Article
- An Inferred Ancestral CotA Laccase with Improved Expression and Kinetic Efficiency.International journal of molecular sciences · 2023Article
- Topiary: Pruning the manual labor from ancestral sequence reconstruction.Protein science : a publication of the Protein Society · 2023Article
- Proteome-wide 3D structure prediction provides insights into the ancestral metabolism of ancient archaea and bacteria.Nature communications · 2022Article
19 more citing papers are in PubMed but not listed here.
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Authors and funding
9 authors at 2 institutions in 1 country.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Theoretical studies have focused on the environmental temperature of the universal common ancestor of life with conflicting conclusions. Here we provide experimental support for the existence of a thermophilic universal common ancestor. We present the thermal stabilities and catalytic efficiencies of nucleoside diphosphate kinases (NDK), designed using the information contained in predictive phylogenetic trees, that seem to represent the last common ancestors of Archaea and of Bacteria. These enzymes display extreme thermal stabilities, suggesting thermophilic ancestries for Archaea and Bacteria. The results are robust to the uncertainties associated with the sequence predictions and to the tree topologies used to infer the ancestral sequences. Moreover, mutagenesis experiments suggest that the universal ancestor also possessed a very thermostable NDK. Because, as we show, the stability of an NDK is directly related to the environmental temperature of its host organism, our results indicate that the last common ancestor of extant life was a thermophile that flourished at a very high temperature.
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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.