title: Question 3: the worlds of the prebiotic and never born proteins.
abstract: Starting from the statement that no reliable methods are known to produce high molecular weight polypeptides under prebiotic conditions, a possible approach, at least to understand the differences between extant proteins and the possible large number of never born proteins, could be biological. Using the phage display method a large library of totally random amino acidic sequences was obtained. Consequently, different experiments to directly consider the frequency of stable folds were performed, and the interesting results obtained from such new approach are discussed in terms of contingency, contributing to the discussion on the selection mechanism of extant proteins.
authors.affiliation: Centro Studi e Ricerche E. Fermi, Via Panisperna 89, 00184 Rome, Italy.
authors.forename: Cristiano
authors.initials: C
authors.lastname: Chiarabelli
authors.forename: Davide
authors.initials: D
authors.lastname: De Lucrezia
mesh_terms: D000595:Amino Acid Sequence; D008969:Molecular Sequence Data; D019151:Peptide Library; D017510:Protein Folding; D011506:Proteins / Q000737:chemistry / Q000235:genetics
chemical_list: D019151:Peptide Library; D011506:Proteins