Pre-LUCA Protein Evolution: Lessons from Metabolism and Machine Learning

How can we reconstruct the earliest stages of protein evolution? In this talk, I will discuss two surviving records of pre-LUCA protein evolution – the web of protein fold requirements in planetary-scale metabolism and the patterns of fragment reuse across the protein universe. On the basis of these data, I will argue that the emergence of folded proteins is a lawful, and thus predictable, process. Finally, I will identify structural motifs that may have helped seed the protein universe as we know it today.