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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,…
In the research on the origin of life, topics that can be considered reasonably shared by the generality of researchers are initially identified. It is then shown that the application of these principles to the results obtained with the…
How could primordial life, before the evolution of genetic systems, adapt to fluctuating environments and achieve homeostasis? This study proposes a minimal, chemically plausible model where homeostasis emerges from a simple chemical…
In this paper we demonstrate how chemical free energy can be produced by a geological process. We provide a thermodynamic framework in which to assess how life emerged at the off-axis hydrothermal vent system; the RNA - clays system has…
This paper analyzes a simplified model of viral infection and evolution using the 'grand canonical ensemble' and formalisms from statistical mechanics and thermodynamics to enumerate all possible viruses and to derive thermodynamic…
Most biomolecules occur in mirror, or chiral, images of each other. However, life is homochiral: proteins contain almost exclusively levorotatory (L) amino acids, while only dextrorotatory (R) sugars appear in RNA and DNA. The mechanism…
The fields of Origin of Life and Artificial Life both question what life is and how it emerges from a distinct set of "pre-life" dynamics. One common feature of most substrates where life emerges is a marked shift in dynamics when…
The poly-tRNA model was recently presented for the origin and evolution of genetic coding. This model has led to a rather precise description of what might have occurred at the beginning of protein synthesis in the first life form. Here, we…
In this review, we discuss the applications of the theory of birth-and-death processes to problems in biology, primarily, those of evolutionary genomics. The mathematical principles of the theory of these processes are briefly described.…
An extrapolation of the genetic complexity of organisms to earlier times suggests that life began before the Earth was formed. Life may have started from systems with single heritable elements that are functionally equivalent to a…
The origin of life on Earth involves the early appearance of an information-containing molecule such as RNA. The basic building blocks of RNA could have been delivered by carbon-rich meteorites, or produced in situ by processes beginning…
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.…
The emergence of membranous compartments (protocells) with encapsulated genetic material was a crucial step life's origin and evolution. The hot spring hypothesis for the origin of life suggests that protocells could have formed in hot…
Despite great advances in our understanding of the formation of the Solar System, the evolution of the Earth, and the chemical basis for life, we are not much closer than the ancient Greeks to an answer of whether life has arisen and…
Molecular biology is a nanotechnology that works--it has worked for billions of years and in an amazing variety of circumstances. At its core is a system for acquiring, processing and communicating information that is universal, from…
In a pioneering study experimental evidence was sought of thermosynthesis, a theoretical biological mechanism for free energy gain from thermal cycling that has been invoked as energy source for the origin of life. A PCR machine applied…
Kinetic theory and thermodynamics are applied to DNA polymerases with exonuclease activity, taking into account the dependence of the rates on the previously incorportated nucleotide. The replication fidelity is shown to increase…
To maintain homeostasis, living cells process information with networks of interacting molecules. Traditional models for cellular information processing have focused on networks of chemical reactions between molecules. Here, we describe how…
Understanding how biological homochirality emerged remains a challenge for the researchers interested in the origin of life. During the last decades, stable non-racemic steady states of nonequilibrium chemical systems have been discussed as…
Research on the birth and evolution of life are reviewed with reference to the maximum entropy production principle (MEPP). It has been shown that this principle is essential for consistent understanding of the birth and evolution of life.…