Related papers: Universal Sequence Replication, Reversible Polymer…
Cellular life requires the presence of a set of biochemical mechanisms in order to maintain a predictable process of growth and division. Several attempts have been made towards the building of minimal protocells from a top-down approach,…
One way to understand the role history plays on evolutionary trajectories is by giving ancient life a second opportunity to evolve. Our ability to empirically perform such an experiment, however, is limited by current experimental designs.…
Organisms leave a distinctive chemical signature in their environment because they synthesize those molecules that maximize their fitness. As a result, the relative concentrations of related chemical monomers in life-bearing environmental…
The present view of biological phenomena is based on a biochemical paradigm that development of living organisms is defined by information stored in a molecular form as some genetic code. However, new discoveries indicate that biological…
Typical bodily and environmental fluids encountered by biological swimmers consist of dissolved macromolecules such as proteins and polymers, often rendering them non Newtonian. To mimic such scenarios, we investigate the motion of swimming…
Can prelife proceed without cell division? A recently proposed mechanism suggests that transient compartmentalization could have preceded cell division in prebiotic scenarios. Here, we study transient compartmentalization dynamics in the…
It is becoming widely accepted that very early in the origin of life, even before the emergence of genetic encoding, reaction networks of diverse small chemicals might have manifested key properties of life, namely self-propagation and…
Polymers-macromolecular systems composed of repeating chemical units-constitute the molecular foundation of living organisms, while their synthetic counterparts drive transformative advances across medicine, consumer products, and energy…
The RNA World hypothesis predicts that self-replicating RNAs evolved before DNA genomes and coded proteins. Despite widespread support for the RNA World, self-replicating RNAs have yet to be identified in a natural context, leaving a key…
One of the great challenges in science is determining when, where, why, and how life first arose as well as the form taken by this life. In the present study, life was assumed to be (1) bounded, (2) replicating, (3) able to inherit…
Molecular clock (MC) is a central concept of molecular evolution according to which each gene evolves at a characteristic, near constant rate. Numerous evolutionary studies have demonstrated the validity of MC but also have shown that MC is…
Microscopic organisms, such as bacteria, have the ability of colonizing surfaces and developing biofilms that can determine diseases and infections. Most bacteria secrete a significant amount of extracellular polymer substances that are…
Dimerization and subsequent aggregation of polymers and biopolymers often occur under nonequilibrium conditions. When the initial state of the polymer is not collapsed or the final folded native state, the dynamics of dimerization can…
An important issue for the origins of life is ensuring the accurate maintenance of information in replicating polymers in the face of inevitable errors. Here, we investigated how this maintenance depends on reaction kinetics by…
Partitioning of (bio)materials in polymeric mixtures is a key phenomenon both in cellular environments, as well as in industrial applications. In cells, several macromolecules are suspended within different biomolecular phases. On the other…
Synthetic polymeric materials underpin fundamental technologies in the energy, electronics, consumer goods, and medical sectors, yet their development still suffers from prolonged design timelines. Although polymer informatics tools have…
The evolution of complex cellular life involved two major transitions: the encapsulation of self-replicating genetic entities into cellular units and the aggregation of individual genes into a collectively replicating genome. In this paper,…
A general and basic model of primordial evolution--a soup of reacting finitary and discrete processes--is employed to identify and analyze fundamental mechanisms that generate and maintain complex structures in prebiotic systems. The…
Engineering simple, artificial models of living cells allows synthetic biologists to study cellular functions under well-controlled conditions. Reconstituting multicellular behaviors with synthetic cell-mimics is still a challenge because…
Abiotic emergence of ordered information stored in the form of RNA is an important unresolved problem concerning the origin of life. A polymer longer than 40--100 nucleotides is necessary to expect a self-replicating activity, but the…