Complexity Digest 2007.22 - 05

28-May-2007

A New Wrinkle In Evolution -- Man-Made Proteins, Innovations-report Bookmark and Share

Excerpts: Nature, through the trial and error of evolution, has discovered a vast diversity of life from what can only presumed to have been a primordial pool of building blocks. Inspired by this success, (...) is now trying to mimic the process of Darwinian evolution in the laboratory by evolving new proteins from scratch. Using new tricks of molecular biology, (...) have evolved several new proteins in a fraction of the 3 billion years it took nature. Their most recent results, (...) have led to some surprisingly new lessons on how to optimize proteins which have never existed in nature before, (...).