ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2018
Modern diversification of the amino acid repertoire driven by oxygen.
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2018. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 35 papers.
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Who cites it
35 citing papers in PubMed, 88 citations in OpenAlex.
- Chiral discrimination of amino acids in meteorite and desert soil extracts via single-molecule nanogap conductance.Nature communications · 2026Article
- Excitatory amino acids as therapeutic agents: Reversing neurodegenerative trajectory by tackling excitotoxicity.Neurological sciences : official journal of the Italian Neurological Society and of the Italian Society of Clinical Neurophysiology · 2025Review
- 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 HOMO-LUMO Gap as Discriminator of Biotic from Abiotic Chemistries.Life (Basel, Switzerland) · 2024Article
- Copper(I)-nitrene platform for chemoproteomic profiling of methionine.Nature communications · 2024Article
- Mutational dissection of a hole hopping route in a lytic polysaccharide monooxygenase (LPMO).Nature communications · 2024Article
- Xeno Amino Acids: A Look into Biochemistry as We Do Not Know It.Life (Basel, Switzerland) · 2023Review
- Article
- Structural Effects on the Antioxidant Properties of Amino Acid Betaxanthins.Antioxidants (Basel, Switzerland) · 2022Article
- A Closer Look at Non-random Patterns Within Chemistry Space for a Smaller, Earlier Amino Acid Alphabet.Journal of molecular evolution · 2022Article
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- Insights into the Thermodynamics and Kinetics of Amino-Acid Radicals in Proteins.Annual review of biophysics · 2022Review
- Probing the Role of Cysteine Thiyl Radicals in Biology: Eminently Dangerous, Difficult to Scavenge.Antioxidants (Basel, Switzerland) · 2022Review
- Concerted and Stepwise Proton-Coupled Electron Transfer for Tryptophan-Derivative Oxidation with Water as the Primary Proton Acceptor: Clarifying a Controversy.Journal of the American Chemical Society · 2022Article
- Tryptophan regulatesProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2022Article
- In Vitro Evolution Reveals Noncationic Protein-RNA Interaction Mediated by Metal Ions.Molecular biology and evolution · 2022Article
- Peptides before and during the nucleotide world: an origins story emphasizing cooperation between proteins and nucleic acids.Journal of the Royal Society, Interface · 2022Review
- Amino Acid Specificity of Ancestral Aminoacyl-tRNA Synthetase Prior to the Last Universal Common Ancestor Commonote commonote.Journal of molecular evolution · 2022Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
5 authors at 3 institutions in 2 countries.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
All extant life employs the same 20 amino acids for protein biosynthesis. Studies on the number of amino acids necessary to produce a foldable and catalytically active polypeptide have shown that a basis set of 7-13 amino acids is sufficient to build major structural elements of modern proteins. Hence, the reasons for the evolutionary selection of the current 20 amino acids out of a much larger available pool have remained elusive. Here, we have analyzed the quantum chemistry of all proteinogenic and various prebiotic amino acids. We find that the energetic HOMO-LUMO gap, a correlate of chemical reactivity, becomes incrementally closer in modern amino acids, reaching the level of specialized redox cofactors in the late amino acids tryptophan and selenocysteine. We show that the arising prediction of a higher reactivity of the more recently added amino acids is correct as regards various free radicals, particularly oxygen-derived peroxyl radicals. Moreover, we demonstrate an immediate survival benefit conferred by the enhanced redox reactivity of the modern amino acids tyrosine and tryptophan in oxidatively stressed cells. Our data indicate that in demanding building blocks with more versatile redox chemistry, biospheric molecular oxygen triggered the selective fixation of the last amino acids in the genetic code. Thus, functional rather than structural amino acid properties were decisive during the finalization of the universal genetic code.
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