New Discovery Made Scientists Say ‘We May Have Been Wrong About the Origin of Life’

For decades, we and our best minds on the planet thought we already understood how life began on Earth. It followed a strict step-by-step direct path, starting with simple amino acids, to a cell and building up over time until it became what we have come to know today. However, new studies are challenging the real order of events, which might have been messier and more complex than our original concept of evolution.

Scientists Looked Deeper Than Ever Before — and Found Something Strange

Scientists for several decades have believed that our genetic code evolved step by step, starting from the building blocks of life, proteins. Amino acids are the molecules that create those proteins by combining and forming a bond. In the present day, when we consume protein, it breaks down into amino acids.

Our body uses those amino acids to grow and repair tissues, make hormones, and other essential chemicals for the brain and overall health. Before, we thought that some amino acids, especially the larger ones, existed later down the line, since the smaller amino acids are thought to be the original ingredients that were used for the formation of life.

However, a groundbreaking study from the University of Arizona looked back 4 billion years and found clues that the ingredients we thought composed the very first form of life might have been wrong, and some amino acids thought not to have existed yet are found to be much older than we realize.

Read more: The University of Arizona

They Traced Proteins Back to Earth’s Oldest Ancestor

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The team studied LUCA — the Last Universal Common Ancestor — it is a group of organisms believed to be the starting point for all modern life, which means that it is one of the very first steps of evolution. In this study, the researchers did not focus on full-length protein analysis but on protein domains, an independent unit in a protein that contributes to its functions.

By analyzing over 400 protein domain families linked to LUCA, the scientists found that some previously known amino acids for being late arrivals have been discovered. So, during that time, they already existed, which could mean that evolution at its first stage is a lot complex and messier than we thought.

Read more: Phys.org

Early Life May Have Used a Different Genetic Code

Many textbooks referenced our genetic code to evolve in a simple and neat pattern. However, since this discovery reveals new data, such as some amino acids, like tryptophan and tyrosine, are already common in ancient proteins means the ingredients that created our building blocks of life might not be the ones we thought.

Remember, before the first cell, there are proteins, and before proteins, there are amino acids that formed to compose them. There are different amino acids; some are smaller and some are bigger. The larger, more complex ones are thought to have existed later down the evolutionary path.

This study changed some of those ideas, as researchers have found over 100 protein domain families, made up of different amino acids, that likely existed before LUCA ( Last Universal Common Ancestor). Some of those may have even belonged to a different genetic code that is already extinct and did not go through evolution.

We May Have Been Wrong About the Origin of Life

Author's Final Thoughts

So, what can we infer from this discovery? It is that the evolution we believed was straightforward is false, and that it might have involved multiple trials and errors to find out which genetic code, made up of proteins, that is made up of combinations of amino acids, is likely to survive, to become the modern existence of life that we know today.

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