On the evolution of the standard amino-acid alphabet 英文参考文献.docVIP

Opinion On the evolution of the standard amino-acid alphabet Yi Lu and Stephen Freeland Address: Department of Biological Sciences, University of Maryland, Baltimore County, Baltimore, MD 21250, USA. Correspondence: Stephen Freeland. Email: freeland@ Published: 1 February 2006 Genome Biology 2006, 7:102 (doi:10.1186/gb-2006-7-1-102) The electronic version of this article is the complete one and can be found online at /2006/7/1/102 ? 2006 BioMed Central Ltd Abstract Although one standard amino-acid ‘alphabet’ is used by most organisms on Earth, the evolutionary cause(s) and significance of this alphabet remain elusive. Fresh insights into the origin of the alphabet are now emerging from disciplines as diverse as astrobiology, biochemical engineering and bioinformatics. At the root of biology there are a handful of biochemical standards, the ubiquity of which tempts us to take them for granted. One is the standard ‘alphabet’ of 20 encoded amino acids, shared by organisms that diverged as early as Escherichia coli and human beings. But numerous lines of evidence, from abiotic chemistry to protein engineering, combine to indicate that this alphabet could potentially have consisted of fewer, more, or just plain different amino acids. So why have these 20 become the standard alphabet? framework beneath that diversity was remarkable. This uniformity - which goes from the structure of DNA, via the ‘central dogma’ of molecular biology that ‘genes make RNA make proteins’, to the codon assignments of the standard genetic code - spurred the scientific revolution that has carried us into the post-genomic era. But behind the biochemical canon lie the deeper questions of why life is built this way, including the question of why pro- teins are constructed using a standard alphabet of exactly these 20 amino acids. Although recent publications have con- sidered similar questions for nucle