Scientists identify fragments of proteins that already existed billions of years ago

Proteins and languages share many similarities – both, for instance, yield their meaning through a proper arrangement of basic building blocks. Andrei Lupas, Director at the Max Planck Institute for Developmental Biology in Germany, and his team apply computational methods to reconstruct primordial building blocks by comparative studies of modern proteins. The same approach is used in linguistics to reconstruct ancient vocabularies through the comparison of modern languages. In a recent st