Evolution of catalytic proteins |
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Authors: | Henrik Kacser Richard Beeby |
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Institution: | (1) Department of Genetics, University of Edinburgh, West Mains Road, EH9 3JN Edinburgh, Scotland |
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Abstract: | Summary It is believed that all present-day organisms descended from a common cellular ancestor. Such a cell must have evolved from more primitive and simpler precursors, but neither their organization nor the route such evolution took are accessible to the molecular techniques available today. We propose a mechanism, based on functional properties of enzymes and the kinetics of growth, which allows us to reconstruct the general course of early enzyme evolution. A precursor cell containing very few multifunctional enzymes with low catalytic activities is shown to lead inevitably to descendants with a large number of differentiated monofunctional enzymes with high turnover numbers. Mutation and natural selection for faster growth are shown to be the only conditions necessary for such a change to have occurred. |
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Keywords: | Enzyme evolution Natural selection Multifunctional enzymes Gene duplication Enzyme specificity Metabolic evolution |
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