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Science Wednesday, January 30th 2013 at 4:00 pm

Test Tube Evolution Creates Artificial Enzyme With New Structure In Lab

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A lab at the University of Minnesota is home to a newly created artificial enzyme that could offer researchers new insights into the origins of life on Earth. That’s because rather than being assembled by researchers one step at a time, this enzyme was created in a test tube by directed evolution. The result is a loosely shaped enzyme that may resemble the collections of molecules in the primordial soup that preceded life on the planet.

Creating artificial enzymes is by no means unheard of, but most researchers working in the field start out with a plan for what an enzyme should look like. Instead of taking this planned approach, the Minnesota team’s work instead starts with a goal for enzyme function in mind. They introduce a lot of different shapes of enzymes, and, using techniques inspired by evolution and natural selection.

The researchers started with a protein that didn’t have any enzyme functions, then made copies of it with randomly introduced mutations. They screened the resulting copies for things like enzyme function that would bring them closer to the qualities they wanted. Promising mutations made it to the next round of tests, while less promising ones were weeded out. Lead researcher Burckhard Seelig makes this comparison:

“It’s kind of like giving typewriters to monkeys. One monkey and one typewriter won’t produce anything clever. But if you have enough monkeys and typewriters, eventually one of them will write ‘to be or not to be’.”

After a few generations, the process left them with a never-before-seen artificial enzyme with the traits they were looking for — in this case, the ability to bind two disparate strands of RNA together.

Now, new research on the structure of the enzyme created by their work has reveled that it has a rather unique structure. Rather than being built of helices and strands like the proteins and enzymes we know and love, the enzyme has a loose structure that winds around a set of metal ions, suggesting that there could be more to enzyme structures than we currently understand — and more ways to build them than we suspected.

(via Science Codex)

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  • Enthusiast

    Wish we had a single, accepted definition for the word “evolution”. In this sense, Earth itself is evolving when a volcano spews out lava and creates a new patch of land. Can something that is not alive evolve? I think not, but you’re free to disagree. Abiogenesis is not evolution. I think this would probably be step 1 in abiogenesis.

    The typewriters/monkeys thing ignores the fact that there are more genetic combinations than there are atoms in the known universe and it appears as if only a handful of combos are valid. You’re more likely to win a world-wide lottery every day for 30 days in a row than you are to have life spontaneously evolve out of nothing and that doesn’t take into account that it would also have to happen in a place that would allow it to thrive.

    It’s not impossible, but I wouldn’t use it as my flagship theory.

    Call me when they take a test tube with proteins in it and create a single-celled organism. Knowing our luck, though, they’d only end up making a virus (still not alive) that wipes out the human race. We could call it the Babelvirus! And then die.

  • Idlethoughts

    Viruses defiantly adapt and mutate but by most definitions are not alive. And yeah the typewriters thing is a bad analogy but making good scientific analogies while still being easily understood and properly quoted is next to impossible.

    I would have tried to elaborate more on abiogenesis, but then I saw who wrote this and I was like, Wait a minute…

    “Look it’s been well established that you don’t believe in evolution you even went as far as to say “Biology is a serious field? That’s funny.” on the article “Research Sheds Light on How Fins Became Limbs”. So please stop trying to pass yourself of as a reasonable person, it tempts people to waste their time trying to educate someone who has no desire to learn and in fact has become quite proficient a avoiding doing so.” -idlethoughts to Enthusiast 21 days ago

    Shit.

  • Anonymous

    More points for evolution, creationists lose again!

  • Anonymous

    Evolution encompass many theories, and as a whole it is backed by more facts than any creation myth. Why do you are confuse cosmology with evolution? And no one said anyone evolved out of nothing. That’s creation not evolution. You are inserting the things that make the least sense in creation into a well understood scientific theory because you failed to understand the theory.
    Evolution is an on going study, and will likely always be, you propose a creation myth in it’s place that was written when people thought the Earth was flat and you could fall off the edge.
    Let’s wrap this up in simple terms: You construct straw-man arguments with absolutely no concept of the study and propose that a myth is a better explanation for the facts, because the myth is the limit of your understanding. That’s just bad science. Your personal preferences and “feelings” on evolution do not alter the fact that evolution is a science and what you chose to believe will never change the facts.