Related papers: Primordial RNA Replication and Applications in PCR…
Prior to the origin of simple cellular life, the building blocks of RNA (nucleotides) had to form and polymerize in favourable environments on the early Earth. At this time, meteorites and interplanetary dust particles delivered organics…
In this paper we review and extend our earlier recent work on thermostated systems. A description of nano-biological systems by Markov chains in coordinate space in the strongly overdamped limit is presented. Characterization of the most…
Even the simplest organisms are too complex to have spontaneously arisen fully-formed, yet precursors to first life must have emerged ab initio from their environment. A watershed event was the appearance of the first entity capable of…
Formation of RNA secondary structures is an example of the sequence-structure problem omnipresent in biopolymers. A theoretical question of recent interest is whether a random RNA sequence undergoes a finite temperature glass transition. We…
To mitigate errors induced by the cell's heterogeneous noisy environment, its main information channels and production networks utilize the kinetic proofreading (KPR) mechanism. Here, we examine two extensively-studied KPR circuits, DNA…
This review article provides a specific example of recombinant cell and protocell technology, moving from what is presently known to suggesting how novel application of existing methodologies could be utilized to design a complex synthetic…
Many mechanisms, functions and structures of life have been unraveled. However, the fundamental driving force that propelled chemical evolution and led to life has remained obscure. The 2nd law of thermodynamics, written as an equation of…
Living systems maintain or increase local order by working against the Second Law of Thermodynamics. Thermodynamic consistency is restored as they dissipate heat, thereby increasing the net entropy of their environment. Recently introduced…
A modified version of panspermia theory, named Nebula-Relay hypothesis or local panspermia, is introduced to explain the origin of life on Earth. Primitive life, acting as the seeds of life on Earth, originated at pre-solar epoch through…
The emergence of biomolecular homochirality is a critically important question about life phenomenon and the origins of life. In a previous paper (arXiv:1309.1229), I tentatively put forward a new hypothesis that the emergence of a single…
A mystery about the origins of life is which molecular structures $-$ and what spontaneous processes $-$ drove the autocatalytic transition from simple chemistry to biology? Using the HP lattice model of polymer sequence spaces leads to the…
The origin of life is yet a compelling scientific mystery that has sometimes been attributed to high-pressure impacts by small solar system bodies such as comets, meteoroids, asteroids, and transitional objects. High-pressure torsion (HPT)…
In the present monograph we formulate a simple model for heat transfer in living tissue with self - regulation. The initial point of the model is the governing equations describing heat transfer in living tissue at the mesoscopic level,…
The search for life elsewhere in the universe is a pivotal question in modern science. However, to address whether life is common in the universe we must first understand the likelihood of abiogenesis by studying the origin of life on…
Folding of RNA is subject to a competition between entropy, relevant at high temperatures, and the random, or random looking, sequence, determining the low- temperature phase. It is known from numerical simulations that for random as well…
Existing state-of-the-art methods that take a single RNA sequence and predict the corresponding RNA secondary-structure are thermodynamic methods. These predict the most stable RNA structure, but do not consider the process of structure…
RNA can be used as a high-density medium for data storage and transmission; however, an important RNA process -- replication -- is noisy. This paper presents an error analysis for RNA as a data transmission medium, analyzing how deletion…
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…
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…
We propose a novel definition of life in terms of which its emergence in the universe is expected, and its ever-creative open-ended evolution is entailed by no law. Living organisms are Kantian Wholes that achieve Catalytic Closure,…