ABSTRACT The carbonaceous chondrite meteorites (CM2) with high contents of organic material, water, and amino acids, might have been the main source of the amino acids of Earth’s biosphere. Based on this conjecture, the relative abundance of the biologically relevant amino acids found in the CM2 meteorites could be observed in contemporary proteins. To verify this hypothesis, a large number of proteins were generated by computational modelling previously used to simulate the potential protein synthesis from the amino acids generated by the Miller & Urey experiment. In the present work, this computational approach is used to simulate an evolutionary process of protein synthesis taking into account the abundance of amino acids found in the CM2 meteorites. The most consolidated proteins found in the three microorganisms, E. coli, M. jannaschii, and S. cereviasiae, were also assembled into a group of preserved proteins, and the polar profiles of the three protein groups (CM2 proteins, Miller & Urey proteins, and preserved proteins) were compared using a Polarity Index Method algorithm [Polanco et al., A Toy Model of Prebiotic Peptide Evolution: The Possible Role of Relative Amino Acid Abundances, 2013]. This analysis revealed a high coincidence between the three groups, thereby supporting the hypothesis that the source of amino acids in the remote past (4 billion years ago) can be attributed (at least in part) to the CM2 meteorites.
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