Related papers: Selection first path to the origin of life
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,…
The origin of heredity is studied as a recursive state in a replicating proto-cell consisting of many molecule species in mutually catalyzing reaction networks. Protocells divide when the number of molecules, increasing due to replication,…
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…
Darwin's hypothesis that all extant life forms are descendants of a last common ancestor cell and diversification of life forms results from gradual mutation plus natural selection represents a mainstream view that has influenced biology…
Metabolism and evolution are closely connected: if a mutation incurs extra energetic costs for an organism, there is a baseline selective disadvantage that may or may not be compensated for by other adaptive effects. A long-standing, but to…
Each living species carries a complex DNA sequence that determines their unique features and functionalities. It is generally assumed that life started from a random pool of oligonucleotides sequences, generated by a prebiotic…
A key step in the origin of life is the emergence of a primitive metabolism. This requires the formation of a subset of chemical reactions that is both self-sustaining and collectively autocatalytic. A generic theory to study such processes…
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…
One of the longest standing open problems in science is how life arises from non-living matter. If it is possible to measure this transition in the lab, then it might be possible to understand the physical mechanisms by which the emergence…
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…
The metabolism is the motor behind the biological complexity of an organism. One problem of characterizing its large-scale structure is that it is hard to know what to compare it to. All chemical reaction systems are shaped by the same…
Deep generative models are able to suggest new organic molecules by generating strings, trees, and graphs representing their structure. While such models allow one to generate molecules with desirable properties, they give no guarantees…
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.…
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…
For understanding the origin of life, it is essential to explain the development of a compartmentalized structure, which undergoes growth and division, from a set of chemical reactions. In this study, a hypercycle with two chemicals that…
At an early stage in pre-biotic evolution, groups of replicating molecules must coordinate their reproduction to form aggregated units of selection. Mechanisms that enable this to occur are currently not well understood. In this paper we…
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…
We propose a scenario for the origin of life based on the coevolution of lipid bilayer vesicles and protein channels.
The origin of life required the emergence of metabolism, an autocatalytic network of enzymatic reactions that synthesize amino acids, nucleotides and cofactors. At the origin of metabolism there were no enzymes--how did it start? Empirical…
Eukaryotic cells are often exposed to fluctuations in growth conditions as well as endogenous and exogenous stress-related agents. In addition, during development global patterns of gene transcription change dramatically, and these changes…