Seminar

On the Evolution of Protein Folds

Dr. Murray Coles

Proteins need to assume specific folds to exert their function, and these folds have been maintained over enormous evolutionary distances. Our hypothesis is that modern protein folds arose by the combination and recombination of a relatively small set of simple ancestral peptides (antecedent domain segments), which themselves emerged in the context of RNA-based replication and catalysis (the ´RNA world´).