No one is certain how life on Earth began. There are several theories of how life started on Earth, but none have been proven. Most scientists agree that life formed after the key inorganic ingredients came together to form metabolizing proteins and eventually life. Even though it is unsure of whether these building blocks of life came to Earth from space, formed in the water, or were a product of "primordial soup", researchers at the University of North Carolina have now experimentally proven the ability of simple proteins to become catalysts like enzymes that could cause the production of metabolism in the very first protocells.


The scientific team, led by Dr. Charles Carter and Dr. Richard Wolfenden, remarkably found that two very simple and very important catalysts for life processes actually came from the same ancient gene on a single molecule of DNA. They were able to recreate this process in the lab by transcribing and translating the complementary strands of DNA to produce the two similar, but different, enzymes that are essential for putting together amino acids to make proteins necessary for life. One strand created the pathway to make amino acids that are needed inside of a protein, while the other strand's product allowed amino acids to be made that would go on the outside of the protein.

Enzymes are a very important key to how life evolved on Earth. Without enzymes there to speed up the chemical reactions, the production of proteins and eventually the rest of the biomolecules necessary for life would not happen fast enough to produce and sustain a living cell. The lack of knowledge from where these enzymes originally came or how they were produced has long been a stumbling block for scientists who study how life on Earth formed and evolved.

With this new experimental data about the probable first enzymes, a whole new path has been opened to help figure out how the first life on Earth formed.

These newly discovered enzymes, called fragments protozymes, bind in their active sites to the energy providing nucleic acid Adenosine Triphosphate (ATP). The activation of amino acids using ATP is one of the slowest processes in forming polypeptides and proteins. Without a proper enzyme for this activity, the chains of polypeptides are too slow to keep up with the necessary chemical processes that keep living things alive.

Even though this discovery is significant and a great breakthrough, this does not mean the mystery of how life first started on Earth has been solved. In fact, the research team does concede that even the formation of the protozymes require a ribosome to form. However, it greatly simplifies the process since both of those crucial enzymes were formed at the same time and were available for the synthesis of the polypeptide chains and proteins. The fewer steps needed and the simpler the process means scientists are likely on the right track to eventually solve the great mystery of how life began on Earth.