LacZ-alpha complementation peptide as a tool for molecular evolution studies

Proteins are the key structural and functional molecules of living organisms. Although the last decades have brought a lot of knowledge about their structural and functional characteristics, science still lacks very basic answers about how these properties evolved. Current predominant opinions suggest that early genetic code contained only a subset of today's canonical amino acids. Both exogenous and endogenous sources of prebiotic amino acids imply that even though the prebiotic amino acid repertoire was very broad, only about half of the proteinogenic amino acids were present. It follows that the ''evolutionary new'' amino acids were added to the genetic coding system only after the evolution of their biosynthetic pathways. From the current scientific knowledge it is unclear whether proteins composed of "evolutionary old" amino acids could serve basic metabolic functions and if today's proteins could be "reversely-evolved" to be composed of only such a subset of amino acids while maintaining their structural and functional integrity. These questions lie at the core of this study. This thesis aims to test a starting methodology that would randomize "new" amino acid positions by "old" amino acids in the sequence of LacZ-alpha peptide. This peptide was selected as a target model protein because it..