Wednesday, September 13, 2017

Scientists create alternate evolutionary histories in a test tube

9:08 PM    
The study, published this week in Nature by

University of Chicago  Tyler Starr and his advisor Professor Joseph Thornton, is the first to subject reconstructed ancestral proteins to deep mutational scanning—a state-of-the-art technique for characterizing massive libraries of protein variants. The authors' strategy allowed them to compare the path that evolution actually took in the deep past to the millions of alternative routes that could have been taken, but were not.
Starting with a resurrected version of an ancient protein that evolved a new  some 500 million years ago - a function critical to human biology today—the researchers synthesized a massive library of genetic variants and used deep mutational scanning to analyze their functions. They found more than 800 different ways that the protein could have evolved to carry out the new function as well, or better than, the one that evolved historically.
The researchers showed that chance mutations early in the protein's  played a key role in determining which ones could occur later. As a result, the specific outcome of evolution depended critically on the way a serial chain of chance events unfolded.
"By comparing what happened in history to all the other paths that could have produced the same result, we saw how idiosyncratic evolution is," said Tyler Starr, a graduate student in biochemistry and molecular biology at UChicago, who performed the paper's experiments. "People often assume that everything in biology is perfectly adapted for its function. We found that what evolved was just one possibility out of many that were just as good, or even better, functionally than what we happened to end up with today."
Molecular time travel
Over the last 15 years, Joe Thornton, PhD, senior author on the new study and a professor of ecology and evolution and human genetics at UChicago, led research that pioneered "molecular time travel" using ancestral protein reconstruction. In 2013, his team resurrected and analyzed the functions of the ancestors of a family of proteins called steroid hormone receptors, which mediate the effects of hormones like testosterone and estrogen on sexual reproduction, development, physiology, and cancer. The body's various receptors recognize different hormones and, in turn, activate the expression of different target genes, which they accomplish by binding specifically to DNA sequences called response elements near those targets.