Folding Forum

In the other study, Wolfenden and colleagues tested the way proteins fold in response to temperature, since life somehow arose from a proverbial boiling pot of chemicals on early Earth. They looked at life's building blocks, amino acids, and how they distribute in water and oil — a quality called hydrophobicity. They found that the amino acids' relationships were consistent even at high temperatures — the shape, size and polarity of the amino acids are what mattered when they strung together to form proteins, which have particular structures.

"What we're asking here is, 'Would the rules of folding have been different?'" Wolfenden said. At higher temperatures, some chemical relationships change because there is more thermal energy. But that wasn't the case here.