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A structural biologist at the FSU College of Medicine has made discoveries that could lead scientists a step closer to understanding how life first emerged on Earth billions of years ago.

Professor Michael Blaber and his team produced data supporting the idea that 10 amino acids believed to exist on Earth around four billion years ago were capable of forming foldable proteins in a high-salt (halophile) environment. Such proteins would have been capable of providing metabolic activity for the first living organisms to emerge on the planet between 3.5 and 3.9 billion years ago. The results of Blaber’s three-year study, which was built around investigative techniques that took more than 17 years to develop, are published in the journal “Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.”