Origin of Proteins

[Rumraket (Mikkel R.)]

@colewd

We don’t have evidence that this process innovates or how it would.

New Paper in ASM: De Novo Emergence of Peptides That Confer Antibiotic Resistance

About four months ago I came across an interesting PhD thesis on the evolution of antibiotic resistance (by Michael Knopp), and one of the papers published for the thesis work was described as being on the experimental de novo evolution of peptides that give antibiotic resistance. I couldn’t find the paper anywhere at the time so I wrote the author asking for a copy, and was informed it was still undergoing review so had yet to be published. Knopp wrote back to me a few days ago and informed me the paper is now published. I haven’t finished reading it through but it already looks very interesting, and appears to be relevant to many of the discussions we’ve had around here on de novo evolution of ORFan/taxonomically restricted genes, including the ever relevant question of the density of function in protein sequence space. Knopp M, Gudmundsdottir JS, Nilsson T, König F, Warsi O, Rajer F, Ädelroth P, Andersson DI. De Novo Emergence of Peptides That Confer Antibiotic Resistance. MB…