Cortisol molecule. Source: Wikimedia Commons
This article is also available on AstrobioWire, where it was first published.
By resurrecting ancient protein molecules, geneticist Joe Thornton at the University of Chicago has concluded from studies of an early precursor to the protein responsible for the stress response, the Glucocorticoid Receptor (GR), that modern GR could only have developed in one way.
This essentially means that mammalian biology could have turned out very differently. In terms of evolution, such an improbable developmental quirk would suggest that life arising elsewhere might be very different from that on Earth.
many
of our body’s systems work as they do because of very unlikely chance
events that happened in our deep evolutionary past - See more at:
http://www.astrobio.net/news-brief/resurrected-proteins-alternate-histories-sure-path-modernity-physiology/#sthash.DnUSrw3b.dpuf
many
of our body’s systems work as they do because of very unlikely chance
events that happened in our deep evolutionary past - See more at:
http://www.astrobio.net/news-brief/resurrected-proteins-alternate-histories-sure-path-modernity-physiology/#sthash.DnUSrw3b.dpuf
many
of our body’s systems work as they do because of very unlikely chance
events that happened in our deep evolutionary past - See more at:
http://www.astrobio.net/news-brief/resurrected-proteins-alternate-histories-sure-path-modernity-physiology/#sthash.DnUSrw3b.dpuf
"Many of our body's systems work as they do because of very unlikely
chance events that happened in our deep evolutionary past," Joe Thornton
told Astrobiology Magazine.You can read the full article here.
