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The problem of the ‘prebiotic and never born proteins’

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  30 October 2012

Gerald E. Marsh
Gerald E. Marsh*
Affiliation:
Argonne National Laboratory (Ret) 5433 East View Park, Chicago, IL 60615, USA e-mail: gemarsh@uchicago.edu
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Abstract

It has been argued that the limited set of proteins used by life as we know could not have arisen by the process of Darwinian selection from all possible proteins. This probabilistic argument has a number of implicit assumptions that may not be warranted. A variety of considerations are presented to show that the number of amino acid sequences that need to have been sampled during the evolution of proteins is far smaller than assumed by the argument.

Keywords

Protein evolutionRNA-world
Type
Research Article
Information
International Journal of Astrobiology , Volume 12 , Issue 1 , January 2013 , pp. 94 - 98
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2012

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