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Project Progress

In 2010 we began analyzing the near-infinite set of amino acid chemical structures from which evolution selected an alphabet of 20 building blocks for converting genetic instructions into living organisms. We found that the sub-set of amino acids used by biology exhibits some surprisingly simple, strikingly non-random properties if we use the Murchison meteorite as a guide to the amino acids that formed in a pre-biological Solar system.

In particular, a random collection of amino acids is highly unlikely to match the wide, even spread with which evolution’s “choice” represents molecular size, charge and hydrophobicity Philip and Freeland 2010. This feature of the amino acid alphabet appears to have been held more or less constant over the past 3 billion years – even during the earliest period, when life was evolving from an alphabet of ~8 amino acids into the standard 20 of modern biology. We have subsequently extended this analysis to show that the result holds for a wide variety of different scenarios for the molecular origins of life (manuscript in preparation). We have now started to find further experimental tests for this conclusion – such as a new study, led by UHNAI post-doctoral fellow J. Stephenson that asks whether biotechnological engineering efforts to extend, alter or simplify the biological amino acid alphabet match the conclusions we’ve drawn from physical chemistry.

More recently, we have started to apply this picture of the “functional logic” behind the amino acid alphabet to find bridges to the work of other NAI teams, particularly that led by Loren Williams at the Georgia Institute of Technology. Their work to reveal the evolutionary history of genetically encoded proteins reveals a natural, independent test for the conclusions that we are drawing from biophysical chemistry and evolutionary theory. In a related direction we have applied for NAI DDF funds to start a new collaboration with H. James Cleaves (Ga Tech.) to compute the ~27,000 amino acid structures that are of most relevance to life by virtue of similarity in their chemical structures.

During the year, Co-I Freeland has had the pleasure of presenting this work in person to: a group of 40 international graduate and post-doctoral researchers at the UH NAI Winter School, the NAI EC in-person meeting for PI’s, Johns Hopkins university, UMBC, and Georgia Institute of Technology. We have also presented this work via the web to Montana State U. NAI team, and as part of NAI’s first “workshop without walls.” Within the broader area of education and public outreach, Co-I Freeland has written a careful response to current claims by Intelligent Design that no natural process could have produced an origin for genetically coded information.