Researchers Show How Cellular Complexity Can Evolve 140
ananyo writes with an excerpt from a Nature news release: "By bringing long-dead proteins back to life, researchers have worked out the process by which evolution added a component to a cellular machine. ... In a paper published in Nature, researchers recreated an 'ancestral' version of a cellular machine called the V-ATPase proton pump, which channels protons across membranes and is vital for keeping cell compartments at the right acidity. Part of this machine is a ring of six proteins that threads through the membrane. Animals and most other eukaryotes have a ring composed of two types of protein component; fungi are alone in having a ring with three. The researchers used computational methods to work backwards and find the most likely sequences of these proteins hundreds of millions of years ago. The team inserted the DNA into yeast and found that just two mutations can turn the simple 2-protein ring into the more complex 3-protein ring."
Re:inb4 (Score:5, Funny)
I'm fine with people saying evolution is the method, with a deity being the driving force. The issue is when they say that god created everything from nothing in six days around 6,000 years ago and any evidence to the contrary was put here by the devil to lure us away from the truth.
So, you're saying, really that the Devil is in the details?
(sorry)
Old News? (Score:3, Funny)
"The researchers used computational methods to work backwards and find the most likely sequences of these proteins hundreds of millions of years ago."
So why are we just hearing about it now?
Re:inb4 (Score:3, Funny)
Let's say a "day" is the time it takes for the earth to rotate 360 degrees. (Interesting all by itself since such a concrete measurement was unavailable before the earth was created, but whatever.) And then let's say that it took 6 such days for God to create a proto-earth, i.e., the earth the way it was 3.5 billion years ago or whatever.
And then let's say, at the end of day 6, God popped this proto-earth into his cosmic-sized Time Accelerator Machine, closed the lid, programmed the machine such that the relativity factor inside the box yields a 3.5-billion year speedup, set the timer for 1 "day", and then kicked back and cracked open a cold one, or the godly equivalent of a cold one, His work being done.