An international collaboration between four senior scientists from Mainz, Valencia, Madrid, and Zurich has published groundbreaking research in the journal PNAS, shedding light on the most significant increase in complexity in the history of life’s evolution on Earth: the origin of the eukaryotic cell. While the endosymbiotic theory is widely accepted, the billions of years that have passed since the fusion of an Archaea and a Bacteria have resulted in a lack of evolutionary intermediates in the phylogenetic tree until the emergence of the eukaryotic cell. It is a gap in our knowledge, referred to as the black hole at the heart of biology. “The new study is a blend of theoretical and observational approaches that quantitatively understands how the genetic architecture of life was transformed to allow such an increase in complexity,” stated Dr. Enrique M. Muro, representative of Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz (JGU) in this project.
Proteins and protein coding genes increase in length
The article in PNAS demonstrates that the distributions of protein lengths and their corresponding genes follow log-normal distributions across the whole tree of life. To do this, 9,913 different proteomes and 33,627 genomes were analyzed. Log-normal distributions typically arise as a result of multiplicative processes. Following Ockham’s razor principle, the researchers modeled the evolution of gene length distributions as multiplicative stochas
1 Comment
docmechanic
Fascinating insight into the original purpose of ‘junk’ DNA.
'This tension caused by genes that grew at the same rate as before while proteins could not was resolved continuously but abruptly with the incorporation of non-coding sequences into the genes. With this innovation, the algorithm for searching for new proteins rapidly reduced its computational complexity, becoming non-linear through the spliceosome and the nucleus, which separated transcription and splicing from translation.'