Abstract
Most scientists support the theory that life originated from the prebiotic chemistry of early Earth. For decades, this was one of the most intriguing unsolved questions in biology. Proteins are considered as the workhorses of the living cell and have been key players throughout the evolution of all biological organisms, from the chemical origin of life on planet Earth to the present era. Now it is accepted that amino acids, the building blocks of proteins, were abiotically available on primitive Earth. Peptides are likely to have coevolved with ancestral forms of RNA. The Ribosome is the most evident product of this coevolution process, a sophisticated nanomachine that performs the synthesis of proteins codified in RNA genomes. Ribosome is the organelle of the biological cell that functions constantly for protein synthesis, as an intercellular structure made of both RNA (ribonucleic acids) and proteins. Biologists have theorized for a long time that nature tinkered with simpler RNA (than DNA) to overcome the problems of self-replication and storage of information. Today, the Ribosome stands as the most important molecular fossil that supports the existence of an RNA world. The ribosome is an efficient nanomachine that recognizes messenger RNA (mRNA) and translates its information into functional proteins. In 2009 the Nobel Prize in Chemistry was awarded jointly to Prof. Venkatraman Ramakrishnan, MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology, Cambridge, UK, Thomas A. Steitz, Yale University, USA and Ada E. Yonath, Weizmann Institute of Science, Rehovot, Israel: “for studies of the structure and function of the ribosome”. The significance of the Nobel Prize on the Ribosome emphasized its fundamental role in the biological cell that translate the DNA genetic code into functional proteins for all living organisms. The Ribosome reads the messenger RNA (mRNA) sequence and translates that genetic code into a specified string of amino acids, which grow into long chains that fold to form elongated proteins. The Ribosome birth, details of which remain hypothetical, would have created a fundamental shift in this prebiotic period of time. The RNA-dominated world, provided a key ingredient to all life as we know it. Ada Yonath, (Weizmann Institute) and her research group first conceptualized the ‘Protoribosome’ idea nearly 20 years ago, after she and others determined the structure of the modern Ribosome. But to solidify the case for the hypothetical Protoribosome, Yonath and her research laboratory would have to build it. It was a project that other scientists have watched with interest, as well as her laboratory’s achievements in the past two years. They created a primitive RNA machine that can link two amino acids together. The results have created a ripple of excitement among the scientific community. This review deals with the basic facts of Ribosome and its key role in the synthesis of proteins. Also, describes some of the stages of the latest scientific project from a very interesting feature article in the prestigious scientific journal Nature (February 2023).
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