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ORIGIN OF LIFE. "An important open question is whether investigating such a random chemistry setting in the test tube is within the capabilities of current chemistry techniques. What is required is a capacity to handle the high number of molecular species, each potentially at low concentration, in very large volumes and for extremely long periods of time." http://www.weizmann.ac.il/molgen/Lancet/sites/molgen.Lancet/files/uploads/shenhav_lancet_core.pdf View in LinkedIn

BIOTRANSITION FROM THE INANIMATE. "The question "How does life arise from the nonliving?" is first on the list of open problems in artificial life." We do love this grey zone, it appears. https://scholar.google.es/scholar?start=50&q=artificial+chemistry&hl=en&as_sdt=0,5&as_vis=1 View in LinkedIn

ROTAXANE. "Scientists in the UK and Malaysia have created a self-assembling rotaxane that can replicate itself. The result may lead to the development of autonomous chemical systems that mimic cellular processes." http://www.rsc.org/chemistryworld/2015/11/self-replicating-assembly-rotaxane-dna-1 View in LinkedIn

SELF-REPLICATING MOLECULES. "He mentioned three specific groups of scientists, including his group, that have created self-replicating molecules, and indicated that there are others. I asked him if these were derived from naturally occurring self-replicating molecules, and he said that none of the molecules were derived from naturally occurring molecules." https://lnkd.in/d9-rKhE View in LinkedIn

EMERGENT COMBINATIONS. "A single-celled bacterium is alive, but if you separate the macromolecules that combined to create the bacterium, these units are not alive. Based on our knowledge of macromolecules, we would not have been able to predict that they could combine to form a living organism, nor could we have predicted all of the characteristics of the resulting bacterium." https://www.nature.com/scitable/topicpage/biological-complexity-and-integrative-levels-of-organization-468 View in LinkedIn

MOLECULAR EVOLUTION. "What we have demonstrated for the first time is that even if all you have is template-assisted ligation, you can still bootstrap the system out of primordial soup," https://publishing.aip.org/publishing/journal-highlights/origins-life-new-model-may-explain-emergence-self-replication-early View in LinkedIn

UNIVERSAL STRUCTURE. “Indeed, notwithstanding multiple code variants that continue to emerge through the study of protein coding in diverse life forms, the basic structure of the code and the majority of the codon assignments are truly universal.” http://www.mdpi.com/2075-1729/7/2/22/htm View in LinkedIn

DEVIATIONS. “The genetic code is nearly universal in all extant life forms although limited deviations from the standard genetic code have been detected in many groups of organisms, particularly in organelles and parasitic or endosymbiotic bacteria with highly reduced genomes.” http://www.mdpi.com/2075-1729/7/2/22/htm View in LinkedIn

INFORMATIONAL INVARIANT. “The genetic code that defines the rules of translation from the 4-letter nucleic acid alphabet to the 20-letter alphabet of proteins is arguably the single central informational invariant of all life forms.” http://www.mdpi.com/2075-1729/7/2/22/htm View in LinkedIn

CIPHER NOT A CODE. “The code is actually closer to a cipher than a code, and individual species do not have a unique genetic code to be cracked; indeed one of the interesting characteristics of the code is that nearly all life shares exactly the same one, once called the ‘universal genetic code’.” https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0960982216309174 View in LinkedIn