Related papers: A Prerequisite for Life
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…
Metabolism displays striking and robust regularities in the forms of modularity and hierarchy, whose composition may be compactly described. This renders metabolic architecture comprehensible as a system, and suggests the order in which…
Biological membranes mainly consist of lipids and proteins. While the proteins have many functions as single molecules, the membrane as a whole displays physical properties that cannot be explained on the single molecule level. For example,…
Planets form and obtain their compositions from the leftover material present in protoplanetary disks of dust and gas surrounding young stars. The chemical make-up of a disk influences every aspect of planetary composition including their…
The question of the onset of the homochirality on prebiotic Earth still remains a fundamental question in the quest for the origin of life. Recent works in this field introduce the concept of recycling, rather than the traditional open-flow…
The search for Life in the Universe generally assumes three basic life's needs: I) building block elements (i.e., CHNOPS), II) a solvent to life's reactions (generally, liquid water) and III) a thermodynamic disequilibrium. It is assumed…
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…
Biochemical processes typically involve huge numbers of individual reversible steps, each with its own dynamical rate constants. For example, kinetic proofreading processes rely upon numerous sequential reactions in order to guarantee the…
It has been proposed that during the early steps in the origin of life, small droplets could have formed via the segregation of molecules from complex mixtures by phase separation. These droplets could have provided chemical reaction…
Amphiphiles are molecules which have both hydrophilic and hydrophobic parts. In water- and/or oil-like solvent, they self-assemble into extended sheet-like structures due to the hydrophobic effect. The free energy of an amphiphilic system…
Microbes require several complex organic molecules for growth. A species may obtain a required factor by taking up molecules released by other species or by synthesizing the molecule. The patterns of uptake and synthesis set a flow of…
A key result of hydrogravitational dynamics cosmology relevant to astrobiology is the early formation of vast numbers of hot primordial-gas planets in million-solar-mass clumps as the dark matter of galaxies and the hosts of first life.…
Phase separation drives the formation of biomolecular condensates in cells, which comprise many components and sometimes possess multiple phases. The equilibrium physics of phase separation is well understood, but many components in…
This is my attempt to answer Schr\"odinger's question: "What is Life?". In living cell the local combination of atoms is reproduced with incredible accuracy. In the case of protein biosynthesis the notion of the physical aspect of the…
An environment far from equilibrium is thought to be a necessary condition for the origin and persistence of life. In this context we report open-flow simulations of a non-enzymic proto-metabolic system, in which hydrogen peroxide acts both…
Biological mixtures such as the cytosol may consist of thousands of distinct components. There is now a substantial body of evidence showing that, under physiological conditions, intracellular mixtures can phase separate into spatially…
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…
Self-assembly of matter in solution generally relies on attractive interactions that overcome entropy and drive the formation of higher-order molecular and particulate structures. Such interactions play key roles in a variety of contexts,…
The study of origins of life on Earth and the search for life on other planets are closely linked. Prebiotic chemical scenarios can help prioritize planets as targets for the search for life as we know it and can provide informative priors…
To understand the chirality selection in the biological organic system, a simple lattice model of chemical reaction with molecular diffusion is proposed and studied by Monte Carlo simulations. In addition to a simple stochastic process of…