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IRREVERSIBILITY AND ENTROPY. "From the standpoint of physics, this observation contains an intriguing hint of how the properties of self-replicators must be constrained by thermodynamic laws, which dictate that irreversibility is always accompanied by an increase of entropy." http://aip.scitation.org/doi/full/10.1063/1.4818538 View in LinkedIn

THERMAL FORWARD REACTIONS. "Every species of living thing can make a copy of itself by exchanging energy and matter with its surroundings. One feature common to all such examples of spontaneous “self-replication” is their statistical irreversibility: clearly, it is much more likely that one bacterium should turn into two than that two should somehow spontaneously revert back into one." http://aip.scitation.org/doi/full/10.1063/1.4818538 View in LinkedIn

ENERGY FINDINGS. "We find that the minimum value for the physically allowed rate of heat production is determined by the growth rate, internal entropy, and durability of the replicator." http://aip.scitation.org/doi/full/10.1063/1.4818538 View in LinkedIn

REPLICATION ENERGY. "Here, we undertake to make this intuition rigorous and quantitative by deriving a lower bound for the amount of heat that is produced during a process of self-replication in a system coupled to a thermal bath." http://aip.scitation.org/doi/full/10.1063/1.4818538 View in LinkedIn

ENTROPY AND SELF-REPLICATION. "Self-replication is a capacity common to every species of living thing, and simple physical intuition dictates that such a process must invariably be fueled by the production of entropy." https://lnkd.in/dHBaHDW View in LinkedIn

MOLECULAR SALTATIONS. "Under Tkachenko and Maslov's model, the move from monomers to polymers is a very sudden one. It's also hysteretic -- that is, it takes a very certain set of conditions to make the initial leap from monomers to self-replicating polymers, but those stringent requirements are not necessary to maintain a system of self-replicating polymers once one has leapt over the first hurdle." https://publishing.aip.org/publishing/journal-highlights/origins-life-new-model-may-explain-emergence-self-replication-early View in LinkedIn

CRAWLING OUT OF THE SOUP. "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

MOLECULAR TRAIT SELECTION. "Directed evolution has proved to be an effective strategy for improving or altering the activity of biomolecules for industrial, research and therapeutic applications. The evolution of proteins in the laboratory requires methods for generating genetic diversity and for identifying protein variants with desired properties." https://lnkd.in/dwR3hCZ View in LinkedIn

POLYMERIZATION CYCLES. "Tkachenko and Maslov have proposed a new model that shows how the earliest self-replicating molecules could have worked. Their model switches between "day" phases, where individual polymers float freely, and "night" phases, where they join together to form longer chains via template-assisted ligation. The phases are driven by cyclic changes in environmental conditions, such as temperature, pH, or salinity, which throw the system out of equilibrium and induce the polymers to either come together or drift apart." https://publishing.aip.org/publishing/journal-highlights/origins-life-new-model-may-explain-emergence-self-replication-early View in LinkedIn

UNEXPECTED RESULTS. "With the investment of sufficient resources and determination, directed evolution generally appears to yield desired improvements of protein properties, sometimes producing remarkable results." https://lnkd.in/dJawhaB View in LinkedIn