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The origin of life is shrouded in mystery, with few surviving clues, obscured by evolutionary competition. Previous reviews have touched on the complementary approaches of top-down and bottom-up synthetic biology to augment our…
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 building of minimal self-reproducing systems with a physical embodiment (generically called protocells) is a great challenge, with implications for both theory and applied sciences. Although the classical view of a living protocell…
The origin and early evolution of eukaryotes are one of the major transitions in the evolution of life on earth. One of its most interesting aspects is the emergence of cellular organelles, their dynamics, their functions, and their…
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…
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"…
The rise of multicellularity in the early evolution of life represents a major challenge for evolutionary biology. Guidance for finding answers has emerged from disparate fields, from phylogenetics to modelling and synthetic biology, but…
It is well known that life on Earth alters its environment over evolutionary and geological timescales. An important open question is whether this is a result of evolutionary optimization or a universal feature of life. In the latter case,…
A simple stochastic model for evolution, based upon the need to pass a sequence of n critical steps (Carter 1983, Watson 2008) is applied to both terrestrial and extraterrestrial origins of life. In the former case, the time at which humans…
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…
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,…
Living organisms have some common structures, chemical reactions and molecular structures. The organisms consist of cells with cell division, they have homochirality of protein and carbohydrate units, and metabolism, and genetics, and they…
The growth, form, and division of prebiotic vesicles, membraneous bags of fluid of varying components and shapes is hypothesized to have served as the substrate for the origin of life. The dynamics of these out-of-equilibrium structures is…
This thesis broadly concerns the origins of life problem, pursuing a joint approach that combines general philosophical/conceptual reflection on the problem along with more detailed and formal scientific modelling work oriented in the…
The origin of life occupies a very important place in the study of the evolution. Its liminal location between life and non-life poses special challenges to researchers who study this subject. Current approaches in studying the origin and…
As the first step in an investigation of the origin of genetic information, we study how some species of molecules are preserved over cell generations and play an important role in controlling the growth of a cell. We consider a model…
The improbability of a spontaneously generated self-assembling molecule has suggested that life began with a set of simpler, collectively replicating elements, such as an enclosed autocatalytic set of polymers (or protocell). Since…
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…
A key process in the life of any multicellular organism is its development from a single egg into a full grown adult. The first step in this process often consists of forming a tissue layer out of randomly placed cells on the surface of the…
The origin of life is often framed primarily as a chemical problem, yet life's defining feature is evolution. Advances in geochemistry, prebiotic chemistry, and molecular biology have produced diverse scenarios for the emergence of genomes,…