May 21, 2010 Researchers at Spain's Centre for Genomic
Regulation (CRG) demonstrate evidence in support of the common
ancestry of life, thanks to a new computational approach to
study protein evolution. The work, published in Nature, takes
its inspiration from the astronomer Edwin Hubble and uses his
approach to study protein evolution. The extrapolation of
Hubble's approach to proteins shows that proteins that share a
common ancestor billions of years ago continue to diverge in
their molecular composition. The study reveals that protein
evolution has not reached its limit and it is still continuing.
At the same time, it provides us new information on why this
evolution is so slow and conservative, showing that protein
structures are more evolutionary plastic than previously
thought. Almost 100 years ago Edwin Hubble observed that distant
galaxies are moving away from Earth faster than those that are
closer. This relationship between distance and velocity is
widely cited as evidence of the origin of the Unive