Related papers: Universal Sequence Replication, Reversible Polymer…
While modern physics and biology satisfactorily explain the passage from the Big Bang to the formation of Earth and the first cells to present-day life, respectively, the origins of biochemical life still remain an open question. Since…
Emergence and maintenance of polymers with complex sequences is a major question in the study of origins of life. To answer this, we studied a model polymerization reaction, where polymers are synthesized by stepwise ligation from two types…
A fundamental problem in protobiological dynamics is to understand how chemically generated polymers can form persistent sequence distributions before the emergence of replication. We study deterministic polymer growth in which each finite…
Template directed replication of nucleic acids is at the essence of all living beings and a major milestone for any origin of life scenario. We here present an idealized model of prebiotic sequence replication, where binary polymers act as…
Polymer models are a widely used tool to study the prebiotic formation of metabolism at the origins of life. Counts of the number of reactions in these models are often crucial in probabilistic arguments concerning the emergence of…
The aims of this paper are to propose, construct and analyse microscopic kinetic models for the emergence of long chains of RNA from monomeric beta-D-ribonucleotide precursors in prebiotic circumstances. Our theory starts out from similar…
Reduction of information entropy along with ever-increasing complexity are among the key signatures of living matter. Understanding the onset of such behavior in early prebiotic world is essential for solving the problem of origins of life.…
Implicit in the RNA world hypothesis is that prebiotic RNA synthesis, despite occurring in an environment without biochemical catalysts, produced the long RNA polymers which are essential to the formation of life. In order to investigate…
A central challenge in the origin of life is understanding how catalytic peptide-like polymers and information-bearing nucleic acid-like polymers emerged as an interde-pendent system. This study constructs a primordial cognitive model…
It is suggested that life originated in a three-step process referred to as the jigsaw model. RNA, proteins, or similar organic molecules polymerized in a dehydrated carbon-rich environment, on surfaces in a carbon-rich environment, or in…
At odds with a traditional view of molecular evolution that seeks a descent-with-modification relationship between functional sequences, new functions can emerge {\it de novo} with relative ease. At early times of molecular evolution,…
Self-replicability is the unique attribute observed in all the living organisms and the question how the life was physically initiated could be equivalent to the question how self-replicating informative polymers were formed in the abiotic…
An autocatalytic pattern matching polymer system is studied as an abstract model for chemical ecosystem evolution. Highly ordered populations with particular sequence patterns appear spontaneously out of a vast number of possible states.…
Based on the oligomer-world hypothesis we propose an abstract model where the molecular recognition among oligomers is described in the shape space. The origin of life in the oligomer world is regarded as the establishment of a metabolic…
Polymers, macromolecules formed from covalently bonded monomers, underpin countless technologies and are indispensable to modern life. While deep learning is advancing polymer science, existing methods typically represent the whole polymer…
The correlations between the sequence of monomers in a polymer and its three-dimensional structure is a grand challenge in polymer science and biology. The properties and functions of macromolecules depend on their 3D shape that has…
We propose an alternative to the prevailing two origin of life narratives, one based on a replicator first hypothesis, and one based on a metabolism first hypothesis. Both hypotheses have known difficulties: All known evolvable molecular…
Polymers consisting of more than one type of monomer, known as copolymers, are vital to both living and synthetic systems. Copolymerisation has been studied theoretically in a number of contexts, often by considering a Markov process in…
Research investigating the origins of life usually focuses on exploring possible life-bearing chemistries in the pre-biotic Earth, or else on synthetic approaches. Little work has been done exploring fundamental issues concerning the…
We study a simple solvable model describing the genesis of monomer sequences for hetero-polymers (such as proteins), as the result of the equilibration of a slow stochastic genetic selection process which is assumed to be driven by the…