A publication co-led by Stephen Fried’s lab and collaborators at the Charles University in Prague has shed new light on the age-old question: Why do proteins use a certain group of amino acids, and not other amino acids that were also available during the Origin of Life?  The researchers show that our amino acids were uniquely adaptive in enabling proteins to adopt folded conformations.  These findings suggest that chemical building blocks useful for biological function were being actively selected for even before life as we know it.

You can read more about these findings here: https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/jacs.2c12987