Life, Volume 9, Issue 1

Reporter genes have contributed to advancements in molecular biology. Binding of an upstream regulatory protein to a downstream reporter promoter allows quantification of the activity of the upstream protein produced from the corresponding gene. In s...

The biomolecular homochirality in living organisms has been investigated for decades, but its origin remains poorly understood. It has been shown that circular polarized light (CPL) and other energy sources are capable of inducing small enantiomeric...

Replicators are fundamental to the origin of life and evolvability. Biology exhibits homochirality: only one of two enantiomers is used in proteins and nucleic acids. Thermodynamic studies of chemical replicators able to lead to homochirality shed va...

A paradigm shift in one field can trigger paradigm shifts in other fields. This is illustrated by the paradigm shifts that have occurred in bacterial physiology following the discoveries that bacteria are not unstructured, that the bacterial cell cyc...

The very specific thermodynamic instability and kinetic stability of phosphate esters and anhydrides impart them invaluable properties in living organisms in which highly efficient enzyme catalysts compensate for their low intrinsic reactivity. Consi...

Systems chemistry deals with the design and study of complex chemical systems. However, such systems are often difficult to investigate experimentally. We provide an example of how theoretical and simulation-based studies can provide useful insights...

The spheroplasts and protoplasts of cell wall-deficient (CWD) bacteria are able to revert to their original cellular morphologies through the regeneration of their cell walls. However, whether this is true for giant protoplasts (GPs), which can be as...

Information is the currency of life, but the origin of prebiotic information remains a mystery. We propose transitional pathways from the cosmic building blocks of life to the complex prebiotic organic chemistry that led to the origin of information...

Microbial cooperation pervades ecological scales, from single-species populations to host-associated microbiomes. Understanding the mechanisms promoting the stability of cooperation against potential threats by cheaters is a major question that only...

Settled on the foundations laid by zoologists and embryologists more than a century ago, the study of symbiosis between prokaryotes and eukaryotes is an expanding field. In this review, we present several models of insect–bacteria symbioses tha...

The origins of life require the emergence of informational polymers capable of reproduction. In the RNA world on the primordial Earth, reproducible RNA molecules would have arisen from a mixture of compositionally biased, poorly available, short RNA...

A mixture of sugar diphosphates is produced in reactions between small aldehyde phosphates catalysed by layered double hydroxide (LDH) clays under plausibly prebiotic conditions. A subset of these, pentose diphosphates, constitute the backbone subuni...

We study the distribution of new classes of motifs in genes, a research field that has not been investigated to date. A single-frame motif SF has no trinucleotide in reading frame (frame 0) that occurs in a shifted frame (frame 1 or 2), e.g., the dic...

Extant life uses two kinds of linear biopolymers that mutually control their own production, as well as the cellular metabolism and the production and homeostatic maintenance of other biopolymers. Nucleic acids are linear polymers composed of a relat...

The alkaline-hydrothermal-vent theory for the origin of life predicts the spontaneous reduction of CO₂, dissolved in acidic ocean waters, with H₂ from the alkaline vent effluent. This reaction would be catalyzed by Fe(Ni)S clusters precipitated at th...

Ecosystems are complex networks of interacting individuals co-evolving with their environment. As such, changes to an interaction can influence the whole ecosystem. However, to predict the outcome of these changes, considerable understanding of proce...

We present a scheme for implementing a version of task switching in engineered bacteria, based on the manipulation of plasmid copy numbers. Our method allows for the embedding of multiple computations in a cellular population, whilst minimising resou...

Heterocysts are specialized cells that differentiate in the filaments of heterocystous cyanobacteria. Their role is to maintain a microoxic environment for the nitrogenase enzyme during diazotrophic growth. The lack of photosynthetic water oxidation...

Systems Chemistry has its roots in the research on the autocatalytic self-replication of biological macromolecules, first of all of synthetic deoxyribonucleic acids. A personal tour through the early works of the founder of Systems Chemistry, and of...

There are two dominant and contrasting classes of origin of life scenarios: those predicting that life emerged in submarine hydrothermal systems, where chemical disequilibrium can provide an energy source for nascent life; and those predicting that l...

There is a consensus that the interaction of organic molecules with the surfaces of naturally-occurring minerals might have played a crucial role in chemical evolution and complexification in a prebiotic era. The hurdle of an overly diluted primordia...

Understanding the thermodynamics of the duplication process is a fundamental step towards a comprehensive physical theory of biological systems. However, the immense complexity of real cells obscures the fundamental tensions between energy gradients...

Rigorous peer-review is the corner-stone of high-quality academic publishing [...]

Life as we know it would not exist without the ability of protein sequences to bind metal ions. Transition metals, in particular, play essential roles in a wide range of structural and catalytic functions. The ubiquitous occurrence of metalloproteins...

Synthetic biology is an engineering view on biotechnology, which has revolutionized genetic engineering. The field has seen a constant development of metaphors that tend to highlight the similarities of cells with machines. I argue here that living o...

Authors often assert that a key feature of 21st-century synthetic biology is its use of an ‘engineering approach’; design using predictive models, modular architecture, construction using well-characterized standard parts, and rigorous te...

The scale insect Dactylopius coccus produces high amounts of carminic acid, which has historically been used as a pigment by pre-Hispanic American cultures. Nowadays carmine is found in food, cosmetics, and textiles. Metagenomic approaches revealed t...

“Synthetic cells” research focuses on the construction of cell-like models by using solute-filled artificial microcompartments with a biomimetic structure. In recent years this bottom-up synthetic biology area has considerably progressed,...

Mutualistic symbiosis and eusociality have developed through gradual evolutionary processes at different times in specific lineages. Like some species of termites and ants, ambrosia beetles have independently evolved a mutualistic nutritional symbios...

Heterocyst-forming cyanobacteria are multicellular organisms that grow as chains of cells (filaments or trichomes) in which the cells exchange regulators and nutrients. In this article, we review the morphological, physiological and genetic data that...