Experiments demonstrating de novo origins?

[glipsnort (Steve Schaffner)]

@icn54321

Origin of novelty within evolution is of secondary interest; addressing someone like Douglas Axe in protein evolution. I think the opsin paper above got at this, but always happy to receive more sources.

Comments (along with some references) that I’ve made previously pertaining to the Axe study:

Examples of irreducible complexity?

I’d seen it before but never read it through. In response to your question here, though, I decided to read it in detail (skimming some of the boilerplate about frequentist and Bayesian statistics and the like). Holy cow – it’s worse than I thought. Pretty much all of the work that they cite to support their conclusions comes from a handful of ID and creationists sources, while many of the references to the conventional scientific literature seem to be window dressing. Take section 4.1. There, …

Examples of irreducible complexity?

I knew I shouldn’t have closed that tab … [rummage, rummage]. Here it is: Multitarget selection of catalytic antibodies with β-lactamase activity using phage display - PubMed

Examples of irreducible complexity?

I think you’ve misunderstood. The library they constructed consists of fragments of antibodies. The antibodies come from mice, where they are generated (as usual) by random mutation and recombination of existing sequence. So they are random peptides. They got the antibodies from mice of two strains, one (and only one) of which is prone to autoimmune disease, which has previously been shown to generate catalytic antibodies more often than healthy mice. This is probably because mice normally have…

Examples of irreducible complexity?

@Vanengelen, here’s a paper you might look at, reconstructing the acquisition of a radically new function by an existing protein: Evolution of an ancient protein function involved in organized multicellularity in animals | eLife

Examples of irreducible complexity?

Evidence that catalysis is actually functional in living systems? And yet the dipeptide seryl-histidine shows catalytic activity, as do random 12-AA peptides when attached to phage (Discovery of Catalytic Phages by Biocatalytic Self-Assembly - PMC). Catalytic activity seems to pop up all over the place.

Examples of irreducible complexity?

Cool. So while most antibodies aren’t catalytic, some are and sometimes that activity may be useful. Stepping back to the broader question, I see that there is actually a substantial literature about catalysis by small peptides, which occurs quite often. For example, one paper (https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/ja0108584) reported construction of a library of octapeptides in which six amino acid positions were randomly populated from 14 amino acids. Roughly one thousand of the resulting octapept…