Peter R. Wills

The paper develops substitution models that account for changes in the coding alphabet size over time, finding support for a reduced ancient alphabet in old proteins and rejecting it in young ones.

This paper introduces a probabilistic framework to detect evolutionary bursts during branching events, showing evidence in proteins, morphologies, and languages.

The paper identifies a functional urzyme, GlyCA, from an arctic fox genome that exhibits enhanced catalytic activity compared to known urzymes, supporting the idea that urzymes represent ancestral catalytic activities in genetic coding.

AARS Online provides a curated database of aminoacyl-tRNA synthetases with sequence, structure, and evolutionary information, accessible via an interactive platform.

HetMM introduces a kinetic model to analyze enzyme mixtures with heterogeneous catalytic activities, showing it outperforms the standard Michaelis-Menten model in both homogeneous and heterogeneous systems.

The paper explores how Class I and II aminoacyl-tRNA synthetases discriminated between tRNA substrates, leading to the formation of the first cognate pairs and the origin of genetic coding.