相关论文: Reciprocal Nucleopeptides as the Ancestral Darwini…
The fields of Origin of Life and Artificial Life both question what life is and how it emerges from a distinct set of "pre-life" dynamics. One common feature of most substrates where life emerges is a marked shift in dynamics when…
We propose an alternative to the prevailing two origin of life narratives, one based on a replicator first hypothesis, and one based on a metabolism first hypothesis. Both hypotheses have known difficulties: All known evolvable molecular…
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…
Due to the asymmetric nature of the nucleotides, the extant informational biomolecule, DNA, is constrained to replicate unidirectionally on a template. As a product of molecular evolution that sought to maximize replicative potential, DNA's…
Explaining the origin of life requires us to explain how self-replication arises. To be specific, how can a self-replicating entity develop spontaneously from a chemical reaction system in which no reaction is self-replicating? Previously…
While all organisms on Earth descend from a common ancestor, there is no consensus on whether the origin of this ancestral self-replicator was a one-off event or whether it was only the final survivor of multiple origins. Here we use the…
Research investigating the origins of life usually focuses on exploring possible life-bearing chemistries in the pre-biotic Earth, or else on synthetic approaches. Little work has been done exploring fundamental issues concerning the…
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…
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…
A poorly understood step in the transition from a chemical to a biological world is the emergence of self-replicating molecular systems. We study how a precursor for such a replicator might arise in a hydrothermal RNA reactor, which…
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,…
Background: The idea that autocatalytic sets played an important role in the origin of life is not new. However, the likelihood of autocatalytic sets emerging spontaneously has long been debated. Recently, progress has been made along two…
Ultraviolet light incident on organic material can initiate its spontaneous dissipative structuring into chromophores which can then catalyze their own replication. This may have been the case for one of the most ancient of all chromophores…
The dominant paradigm in origin of life research is that of an RNA world. However, despite experimental progress towards the spontaneous formation of RNA, the RNA world hypothesis still has its problems. Here, we introduce a novel…
Artificial organisms are computer programs that self-replicate, mutate, compete and evolve. How do these lifelike information-processing behaviours could arise in diverse far-from-equilibrium physical systems remains an open question. Here,…
The poly-tRNA model was recently presented for the origin and evolution of genetic coding. This model has led to a rather precise description of what might have occurred at the beginning of protein synthesis in the first life form. Here, we…
The origin of life must have been preceded by Darwin-like evolutionary dynamics that could propagate it. How did that adaptive dynamics arise? And from what prebiotic molecules? Using evolutionary invasion analysis, we develop a universal…
The analysis of correlations of amino acid occurrences in globular proteins has led to the development of statistical tools that can identify native contacts -- portions of the chains that come to close distance in folded structural…
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…
About 4 billion years ago, the Earth probably fulfilled the environmental conditions necessary to favour the transition from primitive chemistry to life. Based on a theoretical hairpin duplication origin of tRNAs and their putative…