Origins of Life The origin of life is a scientific problem which
is not yet solved. There are plenty of ideas, but few
established facts. It is generally agreed that all life today
evolved by common descent from a single primitive life form. We
do not know how this early form came about, but scientists think
it was a natural process which took place perhaps 3.9 billion
years ago. Researchers in the Evolutionary Bioinformatics
Laboratory at the University of Illinois in collaboration with
German scientists have been using bioinformatics techniques to
probe the world of proteins for answers to questions about the
origins of life. Proteins are formed from chains of amino acids
and fold into three-dimensional structures that determine their
function. According to crop sciences professor Gustavo Caetano-
Anollés, very little is known about the evolutionary drivers for
this folding. To do this, they looked at all known protein
structures as defined in the Structural Classification of
Proteins (SCOP) database and min