Month: September 2022

THE DOGMA. "Then, somewhere along the line, these growing polymer chains developed the ability to make copies of themselves. Competition between these molecules would allow the ones most efficient at making copies of themselves to do so faster or with greater abundance, a trait that would be shared by the copies they made. These rapid replicators would fill the soup faster than the other polymers, allowing the information they encoded to be passed on from one generation to another and, eventually, giving rise to what we think of today as life." https://publishing.aip.org/publishing/journal-highlights/origins-life-new-model-may-explain-emergence-self-replication-early View in LinkedIn

MISSING LINK. "Or so the story goes. But with no fossil record to check from those early days, it's a narrative that still has some chapters missing. One question in particular remains problematic: what enabled the leap from a primordial soup of individual monomers to self-replicating polymer chains?" https://publishing.aip.org/publishing/journal-highlights/origins-life-new-model-may-explain-emergence-self-replication-early View in LinkedIn

ONE PROPOSED LINK. "A new model published this week in The Journal of Chemical Physics, from AIP Publishing, proposes a potential mechanism by which self-replication could have emerged. It posits that template-assisted ligation, the joining of two polymers by using a third, longer one as a template, could have enabled polymers to become self-replicating." https://publishing.aip.org/publishing/journal-highlights/origins-life-new-model-may-explain-emergence-self-replication-early View in LinkedIn

THE SELF-REPLICATOR. "One minimum requirement for evolution seems to be a self-replicator, suggesting that von Neumann saw it as the special case between degenerative production and increasing-complexity production, being able to produce something of the same level of complexity as itself." https://lnkd.in/d2nPhjW View in LinkedIn

THE GREY ZONE. "Understanding how life arose from non-living matter remains a fundamental scientific mystery. At a basic level, life is a self-sustaining chemical network capable of Darwinian evolution." https://lnkd.in/dfHDAdv View in LinkedIn

"THE EMERGENT PROPERTIES that we recognize as life ultimately stem from networks of molecular interactions and chemical transformations." https://lnkd.in/dfHDAdv View in LinkedIn

KEY. "Molecular self-replication was almost certainly of central importance in the origin of life." https://lnkd.in/dfHDAdv View in LinkedIn

PREBIOTIC CHEMISTRY. "The formose reaction is both notoriously complex and has the feature of autocatalysis, making it of prebiotic importance. It is in fact the best known example of a self-organized chemical cycle that bears on the origins of life but is absent of genetic material." http://www.mdpi.com/2075-1729/2/4/313/htm View in LinkedIn

GENOTYPE + PHENOTYPE = BEHAVIOR. "Once Nature had the capacity to synthesize information-bearing macromolecules though, the stochasticity of the system became embodied into the “behavior” of the molecules because now there was the possibility that a molecule was the system! In essence, a system requires both a genotype and a phenotype to be able to display behavior." http://www.mdpi.com/2075-1729/2/4/313/htm View in LinkedIn

REPLICATION OF INFORMATION. "The key to the origins of life is the replication of information. Linear polymers such as nucleic acids that both carry information and can be replicated are currently what we consider to be the basis of living systems." https://lnkd.in/drTPyYN View in LinkedIn