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Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series A: Mathematical, physical, and engineering sciences, 2017-12, Vol.375 (2109), p.20160341-20160341
Universal biology and the statistical mechanics of early life
Ist Teil von
Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series A: Mathematical, physical, and engineering sciences, 2017-12, Vol.375 (2109), p.20160341-20160341
Ort / Verlag
England: The Royal Society Publishing
Erscheinungsjahr
2017
Quelle
Alma/SFX Local Collection
Beschreibungen/Notizen
All known life on the Earth exhibits at least two non-trivial common features: the canonical genetic code and biological homochirality, both of which emerged prior to the Last Universal Common Ancestor state. This article describes recent efforts to provide a narrative of this epoch using tools from statistical mechanics. During the emergence of self-replicating life far from equilibrium in a period of chemical evolution, minimal models of autocatalysis show that homochirality would have necessarily co-evolved along with the efficiency of early-life self-replicators. Dynamical system models of the evolution of the genetic code must explain its universality and its highly refined error-minimization properties. These have both been accounted for in a scenario where life arose from a collective, networked phase where there was no notion of species and perhaps even individuality itself. We show how this phase ultimately terminated during an event sometimes known as the Darwinian transition, leading to the present epoch of tree-like vertical descent of organismal lineages. These examples illustrate concrete examples of universal biology: the quest for a fundamental understanding of the basic properties of living systems, independent of precise instantiation in chemistry or other media.
This article is part of the themed issue ‘Reconceptualizing the origins of life’.