Origins Of life: The Protein Folding Problem All Over Again?
Searches using a golf course landscape are random and slow. (Left, Top) Protein folding searches conformations to find the native structure. (Left, Bottom) Origins searches sequence space to find given functional proteins. (Right) A golf course landscape representing a completely random search process. It is shown with a single minimum; however, sometimes protein folding funnels can have multiple minima, and we expect that sequence funnels will too. — PNAS
How did specific useful protein sequences arise from simpler molecules at the origin of life? This seemingly needle-in-a-haystack problem has remarkably close resemblance to the old Protein Folding Problem, for which the solution is now known from statistical physics.
Based on the logic that Origins must have come only after there was an operative evolution mechanism-which selects on phenotype, not genotype-we give a perspective that proteins and their folding processes are likely to have been the primary driver of the early stages of the origin of life.
Origins of life: The Protein Folding Problem all over again?, PNAS (open access)
Astrobiology,
