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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

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

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

SOME VIRTUES OF BOXES. "These molecular parasites would have been a major driver for the development of compartmentalization/cellularization, as more robust compartments could have outcompeted parasite-ridden compartments." http://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/ar200325v View in LinkedIn

POLYMER ASSEMBLY. "When life on Earth began nearly 4 billion years ago, long before humans, dinosaurs or even the earliest single-celled forms of life roamed, it may have started as a hiccup rather than a roar: small, simple molecular building blocks known as "monomers" coming together into longer "polymer" chains and falling apart in the warm pools of primordial ooze over and over again." https://lnkd.in/d8gcKMj View in LinkedIn

MOLECULAR PARASITES OF REPLICATORS. "It is likely that such replicators would have been plagued by molecular parasites, which would have been passively replicated by the RNA world machinery without contributing to it." http://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/ar200325v View in LinkedIn

"COMPLEXITY cannot solely determine behavior. A pertinent example of this is the formose reaction, whereby the incubation of the two simple precursors formaldehyde and glycoaldehyde can lead to the spontaneous synthesis of many sugars, including ribose." http://www.mdpi.com/2075-1729/2/4/313/htm View in LinkedIn

FITNESS AND SURVIVAL. "Molecular variants capable of faster replication would come to dominate a population, and the development of cycles in which templates could foster one another’s replication would have led to increasingly complex replicators and from thence to the initial genomes." http://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/ar200325v View in LinkedIn

PHYSICAL COMPLEXITY. "Complexity is not unique to living systems and can be seen in many non-living physical systems as well as in simple mathematical models." http://www.mdpi.com/2075-1729/2/4/313/htm View in LinkedIn

SELF-REPLICATION. "For nucleic acids, the story likely begins with simple chemical replication, perhaps of the form A + B → T, in which T serves as a template for the joining of A and B." http://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/ar200325v View in LinkedIn