By bringing long-dead proteins back to life, researchers have worked out the process by which evolution added a component to a cellular machine. The result, they say, is a challenge to proponents of intelligent design who maintain that complex biological systems can only have been created by a divine force.This is a great story, but why does it have to mention intelligent design? Let's agree to keep that garbage out of our articles and thinking. Every breath used on ID or creationism is wasted. Indeed, we should not show these ideas contempt because that takes/wastes energy.Cells rely on ‘machines’ made of multiple different protein components to carry out many vital functions in the cell, and molecular and evolutionary biologists have puzzled about how they evolved. In an effort to find out, Joe Thornton at the University of Oregon in Eugene chose to study a particular machine called the V-ATPase proton pump, which channels protons across membranes and is vital for keeping cell compartments at the right acidity. Part of this machine is a ring of six proteins that threads through the membrane.
In animals and most other eukaryotes, this ring is composed of two types of protein; fungi are alone in having a ring with three. Thornton wanted to know how the machine evolved from the simple to the more complex form. And, because he has built a lab that specializes in resurrecting ancient proteins, he had just the tools to find out at hand.
One other thing, if you want to know more about the proton pump mentioned in the article, read Nick Lane's Power, Sex, Suicide: Mitochondria and the Meaning of Life. The chapter on chemiosmosis (pumping protons across a membrane) is dazzling.
