Life, Volume 7, Issue 4

Various steps in the RNA world required cooperation. Why did life’s first inhabitants, from polymerases to synthetases, cooperate? We develop kin selection models of the RNA world to answer these questions. We develop a very simple model of RNA coope...

A set $X$ of 20 trinucleotides has been found to have the highest average occurrence in the reading frame, compared to the two shifted frames, of genes of bacteria, archaea,...

The primordial Earth probably had most of the factors needed for the emergence and development of life. It is believed that it had not only water, but also simple inorganic and organic materials. While studies since the 1950s on the origins of organi...

Terrestrial geothermal fields and oceanic hydrothermal vents are considered as candidate environments for the emergence of life on Earth. Nevertheless, the ionic strength and salinity of oceans present serious limitations for the self-assembly of amp...

Corresponding to life’s two distinct aspects: Darwinian evolution and self-sustainment, the origin of life should also split into two issues: the origin of Darwinian evolution and the arising of self-sustainment. Because the “self-sustainment” we con...

As of today, the most credible scientific paradigm pertaining to the origin of life on Earth is undoubtedly the RNA World scenario. It is built on the assumption that catalytically active replicators (most probably RNA-like macromolecules) may have b...

The use of molecular markers with inadequate variation levels has resulted in poorly resolved phylogenetic relationships within Ilex. Focusing on southern South American and Asian species, we aimed at contributing informative plastid markers. Also, w...

We report the heterologous expression and molecular characterization of the first extremely halophilic alpha-glucosidase (EC 3.2.1.20) from the archaeon Haloquadratum walsbyi. A 2349 bp region (Hqrw_2071) from the Hqr. walsbyi C23 annotated genome wa...

It has been proposed that prebiotic chemical studies on the emergence of primitive life would be most relevant when performed in a hydrogel, rather than an aqueous, environment. In this paper we describe the ambient temperature coupling of phosphorus...

One of the key steps in the origins of life was the formation of a membrane to separate protocells from their environment. These membranes are proposed to have been formed out of single chain amphiphiles, which are less stable than the dialkyl lipids...

Molecules that replicate in trans are vulnerable to evolutionary extinction because they decrease the catalysis of replication to become more available as a template for replication. This problem can be alleviated with higher-level selection that clu...

Several families of multicopy genes, such as transfer ribonucleic acids (tRNAs) and ribosomal RNAs (rRNAs), are subject to concerted evolution, an effect that keeps sequences of paralogous genes effectively identical. Under these circumstances, it is...

Biological RNA is a uniform polymer in three senses: it uses nucleotides of a single chirality; it uses only ribose sugars and four nucleobases rather than a mixture of other sugars and bases; and it uses only 3′-5′ bonds rather than a mixture of dif...

In this study, we attempt to illustrate the competition that constitutes the main challenge of astrobiology, namely the competition between the probability of extraterrestrial life and its detectability. To illustrate this fact, we propose a simple s...

The reductive tricarboxylic acid (rTCA) cycle is among the most plausible candidates for the first autotrophic metabolism in the earliest life. Extant enzymes fixing CO₂ in this cycle contain cofactors at the catalytic centers, but it is unlikely tha...

Cooperation is essential for evolution of biological complexity. Recent work has shown game theoretic arguments, commonly used to model biological cooperation, can also illuminate the dynamics of chemical systems. Here we investigate the types of coo...

Although studies about the origin of life are a frontier in science and a number of effective approaches have been developed, drawbacks still exist. Examples include: (1) simulation of chemical evolution experiments (which were demonstrated for the f...