相关论文: Reciprocal Nucleopeptides as the Ancestral Darwini…

The emergence of self-replication and information transmission in life's origin remains unexplained despite extensive research on the topic. A hypothesis explaining the transition from a simple organic world to a complex RNA world is…

The RNA world hypothesis suggests a pathway of how life emerged on early earth. It assumes that life started with RNA based systems, capable of storing, transmitting and replicating information, envisioning that monomers and short RNA…

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…

All known life forms are based upon a hierarchy of interwoven feedback loops, operating over a cascade of space, time and energy scales. Among the most basic loops are those connecting DNA and proteins. For example, in genetic networks, DNA…

A self-replicator is usually understood to be an object of definite form that promotes the conversion of materials in its environment into a nearly identical copy of itself. The challenge of engineering novel, micro- or nano-scale…

Since the Hadean era of Earth's history, peptides/proteins and RNA have undergone a complex evolutionary trajectory. Originating from simple monomeric units, these molecules evolved abiotically under various biochemical and biophysical…

While all the information required for the folding of a protein is contained in its amino acid sequence, one has not yet learned how to extract this information to predict the three--dimensional, biologically active, native conformation of…

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…

Protocells are supposed to have played a key role in the self-organizing processes leading to the emergence of life. Existing models either (i) describe protocell architecture and dynamics, given the existence of sets of collectively…

The emergence of life from inanimate matter presents a thermodynamic challenge: the Second Law of Thermodynamics dictates a global trend towards disorder, yet life constitutes localized pockets of profound organization. This paper presents…

Autocatalytic systems are very often incorporated in the "origin of life" models, a connection that has been analyzed in the context of the classical hypercycles introduced by Manfred Eigen. We investigate the dynamics of certain networks…

Cooperation is observed widely in nature and is thought an essential component of many evolutionary processes, yet the mechanisms by which it arises and persists are still unclear. Among several theories, network reciprocity -- a model of…

DNA replication is an essential process in biology and its timing must be robust so that cells can divide properly. Random fluctuations in the formation of replication starting points, called origins, and the subsequent activation of…

Biomolecular networks have already found great utility in characterizing complex biological systems arising from pair-wise interactions amongst biomolecules. Here, we review how graph theoretical approaches can be applied not only for a…

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…

It is becoming widely accepted that very early in the origin of life, even before the emergence of genetic encoding, reaction networks of diverse small chemicals might have manifested key properties of life, namely self-propagation and…

Cellular life requires the presence of a set of biochemical mechanisms in order to maintain a predictable process of growth and division. Several attempts have been made towards the building of minimal protocells from a top-down approach,…

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…

Taking inspiration from biological evolution, we explore the idea of "Can deep neural networks evolve naturally over successive generations into highly efficient deep neural networks?" by introducing the notion of synthesizing new highly…

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"…