Related papers: Primordial RNA Replication and Applications in PCR…
Long ago, life obtained nucleotides in the course of evolution and became a vehicle for them. Before assembly with nucleotides, in the pre-RNA era, what system dominated heredity? What was the subject of survival competition? Is it still a…
Evolution of life on earth was governed, primarily, by natural selection, with major contribution of other evolutionary processes, such as neutral variation, exaptation, and gene duplication. However, for biological evolution to take off, a…
We outline a phenomenological theory of evolution and origin of life by combining the formalism of classical thermodynamics with a statistical description of learning. The maximum entropy principle constrained by the requirement for…
Explaining the origin of life requires us to explain how self-replication arises. To be specific, how can a self-replicating entity develop spontaneously from a chemical reaction system in which no reaction is self-replicating? Previously…
Morphogenesis is central to biology but remains largely unexplored in chemistry. Reaction-diffusion (RD) mechanisms are, however, essential to understand how shape emerges in the living world. While numerical methods confirm the incredible…
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…
How do organisms recognize their environment by acquiring knowledge about the world, and what actions do they take based on this knowledge? This article examines hypotheses about organisms' adaptation to the environment from machine…
The origin of life is often approached through the lens of replication, heredity, or molecular specificity. This paper proposes a thermodynamic framework in which the emergence of life is driven by the persistence of reaction pathways that…
There are two dominant and contrasting classes of origin of life scenarios: those predicting that life emerged in submarine hydrothermal systems, where chemical disequilibrium can provide an energy source for nascent life; and those…
The origin of life can be understood mathematically to be the origin of information that can replicate. The likelihood that entropy spontaneously becomes information can be calculated from first principles, and depends exponentially on the…
Ultraviolet light incident on organic material can initiate its spontaneous dissipative structuring into chromophores which can then catalyze their own replication. This may have been the case for one of the most ancient of all chromophores…
The path toward the emergence of life in our biosphere involved several key events allowing for the persistence, reproduction and evolution of molecular systems. All these processes took place in a given environmental context and required…
The sequence of nucleotide bases occurring in an organism's DNA is often regarded as a codescript for its construction. However, information in a DNA sequence can only be regarded as a codescript relative to an operational biochemical…
Previous studies modelled the origin of life and the emergence of photosynthesis on the early Earth-i.e. the origin of plants-in terms of biological heat engines that worked on thermal cycling caused by suspension in convecting water. In…
RNA's diversity of structures and functions impacts all life forms since primordia. We use calorimetric force spectroscopy to investigate RNA folding landscapes in previously unexplored low-temperature conditions. We find that Watson-Crick…
The emergence of life from inanimate matter presents a thermodynamic challenge: the Second Law of Thermodynamics dictates a global trend towards disorder, yet life constitutes localized pockets of profound organization. This paper presents…
One of the defining features of living systems is their adaptability to changing environmental conditions. This requires organisms to extract temporal and spatial features of their environment, and use that information to compute the…
Due to recent advances in synthetic biology and artificial life, the origin of life is currently a hot topic of research. We review the literature and argue that the two traditionally competing "replicator-first" and "metabolism-first"…
While all organisms on Earth descend from a common ancestor, there is no consensus on whether the origin of this ancestral self-replicator was a one-off event or whether it was only the final survivor of multiple origins. Here we use the…
Self-replication is a capacity common to every species of living thing, and simple physical intuition dictates that such a process must invariably be fueled by the production of entropy. Here, we undertake to make this intuition rigorous…