相关论文: Evolutionary advantage of directional symmetry bre…
The macromolecules that encode and translate information in living systems, DNA and RNA, exhibit distinctive structural asymmetries, including homochirality or mirror image asymmetry and $3' - 5'$ directionality, that are invariant across…
The simplest possible informational heteropolymer requires only a two-letter alphabet to be able to store information. The evolutionary choice of four monomers in the informational biomolecules RNA/DNA or their progenitors is intriguing,…
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…
DNA and other biopolymers are being investigated as new computing substrates and alternative to silicon-based digital computers. However, the established top-down design of biomolecular interaction networks remains challenging and does not…
A fundamental problem in protobiological dynamics is to understand how chemically generated polymers can form persistent sequence distributions before the emergence of replication. We study deterministic polymer growth in which each finite…
In the study of life's origins, a key challenge is understanding how RNA could have polymerized and subsequently replicated in early Earth. We present a theoretical and computational framework to model the non-enzymatic polymerization of…
The evolution of complex cellular life involved two major transitions: the encapsulation of self-replicating genetic entities into cellular units and the aggregation of individual genes into a collectively replicating genome. In this paper,…
The emergence of longer information-carrying and functional nucleotide polymers from random short strands was a major stepping stone at the dawn of life. But the formation of those polymers under temperature oscillation required some form…
Most living systems rely on double-stranded DNA (dsDNA) to store their genetic information and perpetuate themselves. This biological information has been considered the main target of evolution. However, here we show that symmetries and…
The RNA World hypothesis predicts that self-replicating RNAs evolved before DNA genomes and coded proteins. Despite widespread support for the RNA World, self-replicating RNAs have yet to be identified in a natural context, leaving a key…
In this work we analyze some models used to explain the origins of intra-strand parity and strand compositional asymmetries in bacterial genomes. Due to the particular way that these two features emerge in bacterial DNA, we performed our…
Many models for the origin of life have focused on understanding how evolution can drive the refinement of a preexisting enzyme, such as the evolution of efficient replicase activity. Here we present a model for what was, arguably, an even…
Prion and prion-like molecules are a type of self replicating aggregate protein that have been implicated in a variety of neurodegenerative diseases. Over recent decades the molecular dynamics of prions have been characterized both…
The apparent difficulty of designing simple autocatalysts that grow exponentially in the absence of enzymes, external drives or ingenious internal mechanisms severely constrains scenarios for the emergence of evolution by natural selection…
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.…
Being a dual purpose enzyme, the DNA polymerase is responsible for elongation of the newly formed DNA strand as well as cleaving the erroneous growth in case of a misincorporation. The efficiency of replication depends on the coordination…
The correlations between the sequence of monomers in a polymer and its three-dimensional structure is a grand challenge in polymer science and biology. The properties and functions of macromolecules depend on their 3D shape that has…
Template directed replication of nucleic acids is at the essence of all living beings and a major milestone for any origin of life scenario. We here present an idealized model of prebiotic sequence replication, where binary polymers act as…
We systematically explore the self-assembly of semi-flexible polymers in deformable spherical confinement across a wide regime of chain stiffness, contour lengths and packing fractions by means of coarse-grained molecular dynamics…
We consider the problem of undirected polymers (tied at the endpoints) in random environment, also known as the unoriented first passage percolation on the hypercube, in the limit of large dimensions. By means of the multiscale refinement…