Geological evidence tells us that ancient Earth probably looked and felt very different from the planet we all recognize today. Billions of years ago, our world was a comparatively harsh place.
Thanks to advances in a niche field called paleobiochemistry, researchers in the last decade have started to “resurrect” ancient proteins. Studying these proteins’ properties is offering us glimpses of what life was like in bygone epochs. A new study published in the journal Proteins: Structure, Function, and Bioinformatics explores how such ‘resurrection studies’ can provide evidence to support geological models of what the Precambrian Earth was like.
The study was supported by the Exobiology and Evolutionary Biology element of the NASA Astrobiology Program.
