Department of Medical Oncology and Therapeutics Research, City of Hope National Medical Center, Duarte, CA 91010, USA.
Department of Molecular Medicine, Morsani College of Medicine, University of South Florida, Tampa, FL 33612, USA.
Biomolecules. 2018 Dec 18;8(4):179. doi: 10.3390/biom8040179.
To gain a new insight into the role of proteins in the origin of life on Earth, we present the Janus Challenge: identify an intrinsically disordered protein (IDP), naturally occurring or synthetic, that has catalytic activity. For example, such a catalytic IDP may perform condensation reactions to catalyze a peptide bond or a phosphodiester bond formation utilizing natural/un-natural amino acids or nucleotides, respectively. The IDP may also have autocatalytic, de novo synthesis, or self-replicative activity. Meeting this challenge may not only shed new light and provide an alternative to the RNA world hypothesis, but it may also serve as an impetus for technological advances with important biomedical applications.
为了深入了解蛋白质在地球上生命起源中的作用，我们提出了扬努斯挑战：确定一种具有催化活性的天然存在或合成的无规卷曲蛋白质（IDP）。例如，这样的催化 IDP 可以进行缩合反应，利用天然/非天然氨基酸或核苷酸分别催化肽键或磷酸二酯键的形成。IDP 也可能具有自动催化、从头合成或自我复制活性。迎接这一挑战不仅可能为 RNA 世界假说提供新的视角和替代方案，而且还可能为具有重要生物医学应用的技术进步提供动力。
