Scientists Retrace Evolution - Proof in Protein

The complete paper is to be published in Science Express .

What I'm interested in learning is how exactly the structure of the "ancestral receptor gene" was determined and the nature of the original "ancestral protein" coded for and whether this protein even had a physiological function 400 million years(!) ago.

Now, I'll try and find the manuscript.

If you do, and after you read it, could you tell me what it says?

I'll try.

Since would have been mid Ordovician in age , wed be dealing with ancient bony headed fishies, Id have to guess that the protein specifics were a form of osteocalcin. Now the earliest previous osteocalcin protein still able to be structured was from a Permian Iguanadon and even that was incomplete due to thermal decay.
I believe the Creationists are gonna be popping out of the woodwork since they have universally denied the existence of old proteinaceous materials. The neat thing about osteocalcin is its ability to substitute flourine and calcium and magneisum for more volatile fractions. So we can indeed hav fossil proteins.

I actually understood most of that.

Thanks, Miller. Yeah, I was wondering about the methodology and source. Course, UNC, I would guess they would have solid methods and know what they are doing before publishing.

They must have had an "end point" in mind, otherwise, how would they have know they'd arrived?

Namely, they already knew the structure of 400+million old protein, so all they had to do In steps was structurally modify the receptor protein found today, that reacts with cortisol.

From the ancient protein, they deduced the structure of the ancient gene. Then they took the cortisol receptor that's found today, determined the structure of it's gene.

Coupling modification of gene with modification of protein, they were able to trace the "path" by which the cortisol receptor evolved.

Sounds like a reasonable approach, but their methods obviously used very sophisticated instrumentation, the description of which should be available in the MATERIAL AND METHODS.

"resurrected ancient protein". Im curious of its structure and the substitutions in the lattice . Im still assuming that, since form follwos function, there are numerous alkali substitutions in the molecules.

Can someone translate all this into ENGLISH!!! It's seems damn interesting.

It sounds to me like an exercise in the figure of speech known as the "Buried Assertion".

That is a key phrase somewhere in a text which is so surrounded with long technical terms and overlarded with highly impressive titles that it is easily missed due to the dazzling effect created.

It's a sort of word game to test reading ability.

I'll not give the game away other than to say that it is a fairly simple example.

Certainly and despite what spendius above states, it's not an exercise in "Buried Assertion". Each term is full of meaning. That the laymen doesn't understand is irrelevant. The paper wasn't written for the laymen. That's why we have publications such as that from the Future Sciences Group, Scientific American and New Scientist.

However, I fail to see how it's damned interesting.



We haven't actually seen proteins evolve firsthand. (Which is rather an obvious statement).



Uh, it's pretty self-explanatory. Resurrected ancestral protein means they've recreated one from remains they've found.



Basically, this is very vague. Unless I read the methods section, I really don't know what they've done. Phylogenetics is the study of evolutionary relatedness, so basically I assume they somehow compared the ancestral proteins with other proteins that still exist.



Basically, they found mutations that changed the position of amino acids that determined what binds to the receptor, how it binds or how well it binds (depending on what mutations they found) or all three. Changing intraprotein contacts would change the 3D structure of the receptor in question.



Conformational position, is basically a type of formation of atoms or molecules.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Conformers01.jpg



Um, frankly, I don't know how to simplify this bit. It seems rather simple already. Well, to me it does.

Basically, it's stating that mutations that stabilise certain bits of the protein without any immediate consequence proved helpful in allowing the receptor to evolve.

Frankly, I've seen far more informative abstracts, but that's okay. It's the main bulk of the article that scientists are interested in.

Oh yes, by the way, I forgot to mention, I've returned to the forums. But seeing as you're reading this post, I'm sure you've probably figured that out already.

whereve ya been? . It was great having a real geneticist on the boards when you were on . Glad your back.

Frankly, I needed a break from this place. Some of the posts I encountered here were hazardous to my health.

I was posting while I was at our summer place, and therefore I didnt take anything too seriously.

Good to see you were enjoying yourself.

As for the article... A shame it's been published in Science. I can't access that without a subscription and subscriptions to scientific journals are notoriously expensive.

Hi Wolf! Thank you for breaking it down.

I think you can only read the abstract online, without a subscription. In about 2 weeks, I'll be able to hopefully get my hands on the Science article ( Materials and Methods ) and will see if I can post most of the paper here.

A key point to the enzymologist is of course the term "epistatic regulation", a term disliked by many developmental genetists today.

Disliked? I don't even know what it means.