Post 17: Resurrecting proteins from millions of years ago ⏰

One of the “super powers” of biology is the ability to travel back in time, even billions of years. You can take proteins from a family in contemporary creatures, infer their evolution through phylogeny, and use it to infer what the ancestors of those proteins would have been like. This is known as “ancestral reconstruction,” and the 3D structures of these proteins (often called “resurrected proteins”) have even been obtained. The image shows some of the many resurrected proteins and their respective geological eras.

Ancestral proteins are not only interesting from an evolutionary point of view, they are also an excellent starting point for protein engineering; as they have the particularity of being stable and flexible enough (both functionally and structurally) to design even new catalytic functions that do not exist in nature

Refs:

For time travel, you can consult this database with ~200 ancestral proteins (~50 crystals):

• https://revenant.bioinformatica.org/browse

To learn more about the topic:

• Exploring the past and the future of protein evolution with ancestral sequence reconstruction: the ‘retro’ approach to protein engineering

To read an example of protein design from ancestors

• De novo active sites for resurrected Precambrian enzymes

And to be happy … you can deposit money into my bank account.