https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/36702895/

This article may not be open access, but there are probably already
science news sources about it.

We can now accurately infer protein structure from the amino acid
sequence. This means that we know what sequences make certain
structures. There are just a few basic macro structures like alpha
helix and Beta pleated sheets, but we now know what specific amino acid substitutions do to disrupt these structures to make turns and and
transitions to other structures. This article notes that protein
sequence space is huge, but life has only explored a small portion of
sequence space. Life has recycled a few basic structures to evolve
different functions. These researchers have developed a program that
can take what is known about the micro structures and assemble totally
new sequences with the same function as existing enzymes. These are
paths that life has not had to travel because evolution hasn't required
going too much beyond what had previously existed. These guys are demonstrating that there is a huge amount of sequence space that would
do the same things as our current proteins do.

The anti evolution creationists would often quote Yockey and the
probability of any one cytochrome C length protein (a little over 100
amino acids in length) coming into existence by chance. Creationists
are still using numbers like 1 in 10^190 chance, but Yockey also did the calculation of the number of sequences that would work just based on the existing variation then known (back in the 1970's) was something like
10^49 different sequences would do what cytochrome C did. The known
variation is a lot greater today, so the number would be much higher
than 10^49 today, but Yockey noted that there still wasn't very much
chance of generating such a sequence from the known sequence space. This
work tells us that there are a lot more possible starting points that
would produce the same function, and that basically life has what it
needs and didn't have to look any further for functional sequences that
did the same thing.

Ron Okimoto

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