Doug Axe's research — probability of functional proteins

Douglas Axe (Cambridge University postdoctoral work, published in Journal of Molecular Biology) studied beta-lactamase, an enzyme conferring antibiotic resistance, using site-directed mutagenesis. He estimated that the ratio of stable, functional protein structures to the total combinatorial sequence space for a 150-amino-acid protein is approximately 1 in 10^74. With only 10^80 subatomic particles in the known universe, finding a functional protein by chance is finding a needle in an incomprehensibly large haystack. This severely undermines the idea that functional proteins could arise by undirected chemical processes.