Without this gene, you would be a goo

A single gene was responsible for the evolution of complex life, reveal Canadian scientists.



Life on Earth arose for about 4 billion years. For more than 3 billion, this life was invisible, limited to unicellular beings. Someone who visited us would find it to be an empty planet, at least to look under the microscope.

Then everything changed. They emerged plants and animals first mere strainers, such as sponges, then great beings, agile and complex, a psychedelic diversification of forms, the Cambrian explosion, about 500 million years.

What would have been the trigger of this revolution. According to a study from the University of British Columbia (Canada), it was a gene. All modern complex organisms such as animals, plants and fungi, have genes modified versions of it.

The original version was lost in evolution, but his secret was to allow the production of enzymes called protein kinases. They serve as a communication system within the cell, altering other proteins, genes on and off, giving orders to the cell to divide and coordinating the work of organelles, the internal structures which do not exist in bacteria and other more primitive cells.

Perhaps the most important, and they also allow a cell to communicate with each other. Muscles, neurons and even the appearance of an organism to any definite form would be impossible without them. The most that could exist would be colonies of cells? or, as the scientists defined a? booger ?, like that that Auntie makes homemade yogurt. ? If duplications and subsequent mutations of this gene during evolution did not occur, life would be completely different ?, says neurologist Stevel Pelech a cos drivers of the study. ? The most advanced form of life on our planet probably still be a bacterial slime.?

The human being has 500 genes related to protein kinases. When they fail, they cause serious problems. For example, cancers arise when the cells do not get the message to stop multiply. Diabetes is also born of a communication error.

Mutation points to the common ancestor of all modern eukaryotes? not only the aforementioned plants, animals and fungi, but also protozoa and unicellular algae, being far more complex cells that primitive bacteria. The mutation would have happened for about a billion years. ? Our new research shows that the gene probably originated in bacteria to facilitate the synthesis of proteins and then mutated to acquire completely new functions ?, said Pelech. He believes the discovery could create a whole new method of determining the tree of life.