Comprehensive reduction of amino acid set in a protein suggests the importance of prebiotic amino acids for stable proteins.

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 pare

SUBMITTER: Shibue R 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC5775292 | biostudies-literature | 2018 Jan

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature