Tagami Shunsuke
RIKEN Center for Biosystems Dynamics Research, Yokohama, Kanagawa 230-0045, Japan.
Biophys Physicobiol. 2023 Jun 2;20(2):e200026. doi: 10.2142/biophysico.bppb-v20.0026. eCollection 2023.
Is it a miracle that life exists on the Earth, or is it a common phenomenon in the universe? If extraterrestrial organisms exist, what are they like? To answer these questions, we must understand what kinds of molecules could evolve into life, or in other words, what properties are generally required to perform biological functions and store genetic information. This review summarizes recent findings on simple ancestral proteins, outlines the basic knowledge in textbooks, and discusses the generally required properties for biological molecules from structural biology viewpoints (e.g., restriction of shapes, and types of intra- and intermolecular interactions), leading to the conclusion that proteins and nucleic acids are at least one of the simplest (and perhaps very common) forms of catalytic and genetic biopolymers in the universe. This review article is an extended version of the Japanese article, On the Origin of Life: Coevolution between RNA and Peptide, published in SEIBUTSU BUTSURI Vol. 61, p. 232-235 (2021).
地球上存在生命是一个奇迹，还是宇宙中的普遍现象？如果外星生物存在，它们会是什么样子？要回答这些问题，我们必须了解哪些分子可以进化成生命，或者换句话说，执行生物学功能和储存遗传信息通常需要哪些特性。本综述总结了关于简单祖先蛋白质的最新发现，概述了教科书中的基础知识，并从结构生物学的角度（例如，形状的限制以及分子内和分子间相互作用的类型）讨论了生物分子通常需要的特性，得出的结论是蛋白质和核酸至少是宇宙中最简单（也许非常普遍）的催化和遗传生物聚合物形式之一。这篇综述文章是发表于《生物物理》第61卷第232 - 235页（2021年）的日文文章《论生命的起源：RNA与肽的共同进化》的扩展版本。
