ArticleScientific reports2018
Comprehensive reduction of amino acid set in a protein suggests the importance of prebiotic amino acids for stable proteins.
Article in Scientific reports, 2018. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 24 papers.
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Who cites it
24 citing papers in PubMed.
- Resurrecting tRNAs of the Last Universal Common Ancestor (Commonote) Toward Rebuilding the Ancient Translation System.Journal of molecular evolution · 2026Article
- The Borderlands of Foldability: Lessons from Simplified Proteins.Trends in chemistry · 2026Article
- An information-theoretic argument for the restriction of the current biological alphabets to 4 nucleotides and 20 amino acids.Scientific reports · 2026Article
- Origins of Life: The Protein Folding Problem all over again?Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2024Article
- The prebiotic emergence of biological evolution.Royal Society open science · 2024Article
- Exogenous methionine contributes to reversing the resistance ofMicrobiology spectrum · 2024Article
- The Genetic Code Assembles via Division and Fusion, Basic Cellular Events.Life (Basel, Switzerland) · 2023Article
- Effect of the Addition of the Fifth Amino Acid to [GADV]-Protein on the Three-Dimensional Structure.Life (Basel, Switzerland) · 2023Article
- Why we are made of proteins and nucleic acids: Structural biology views on extraterrestrial life.Biophysics and physicobiology · 2023Article
- On the Evolutionary History of the Twenty Encoded Amino Acids.Chemistry (Weinheim an der Bergstrasse, Germany) · 2022Review
- A Closer Look at Non-random Patterns Within Chemistry Space for a Smaller, Earlier Amino Acid Alphabet.Journal of molecular evolution · 2022Article
- Modern and prebiotic amino acids support distinct structural profiles in proteins.Open biology · 2022Article
- Probing the Role of Cysteine Thiyl Radicals in Biology: Eminently Dangerous, Difficult to Scavenge.Antioxidants (Basel, Switzerland) · 2022Review
- 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
- Enzyme catalysis prior to aromatic residues: Reverse engineering of a dephospho-CoA kinase.Protein science : a publication of the Protein Society · 2021Article
- Structure, Folding and Stability of Nucleoside Diphosphate Kinases.International journal of molecular sciences · 2020Review
- Article
- Reconstruction and Characterization of Thermally Stable and Catalytically Active Proteins Comprising an Alphabet of ~ 13 Amino Acids.Journal of molecular evolution · 2020Article
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Authors and funding
6 authors.
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No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Modern organisms commonly use the same set of 20 genetically coded amino acids for protein synthesis with very few exceptions. However, earlier protein synthesis was plausibly much simpler than modern one and utilized only a limited set of amino acids. Nevertheless, few experimental tests of this issue with arbitrarily chosen amino acid sets had been reported prior to this report. Herein we comprehensively and systematically reduced the size of the amino acid set constituting an ancestral nucleoside kinase that was reconstructed in our previous study. We eventually found that two convergent sequences, each comprised of a 13-amino acid alphabet, folded into soluble, stable and catalytically active structures, even though their stabilities and activities were not as high as those of the parent protein. Notably, many but not all of the reduced-set amino acids coincide with those plausibly abundant in primitive Earth. The inconsistent amino acids appeared to be important for catalytic activity but not for stability. Therefore, our findings suggest that the prebiotically abundant amino acids were used for creating stable protein structures and other amino acids with functional side chains were recruited to achieve efficient catalysis.
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