Journal
JOURNAL OF BIOLOGICAL CHEMISTRY
Volume 293, Issue 49, Pages 18854-18863Publisher
AMER SOC BIOCHEMISTRY MOLECULAR BIOLOGY INC
DOI: 10.1074/jbc.RA118.003795
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Funding
- Erasmus Mundus Action 2 program (Lotus III Scholarship) - European Commission
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Explaining the origin of life requires us to elucidate how self-replication arises. To be specific, how can a self-replicating entity develop spontaneously from a chemical reaction system in which no reaction is self-replicating? Previously proposed mathematical models either supply an explicit framework for a minimal living system or consider only catalyzed reactions, and thus fail to provide a comprehensive theory. Here, we set up a general mathematical model for chemical reaction systems that properly accounts for energetics, kinetics, and the conservation law. We found that 1) some systems are collectively catalytic, a mode whereby reactants are transformed into end products with the assistance of intermediates (as in the citric acid cycle), whereas some others are self-replicating, that is, different parts replicate each other and the system self-replicates as a whole (as in the formose reaction, in which sugar is replicated from form-aldehyde); 2) side reactions do not always inhibit such systems; 3) randomly chosen chemical universes (namely random artificial chemistries) often contain one or more such systems; 4) it is possible to construct a self-replicating system in which the entropy of some parts spontaneously decreases, in a manner similar to that discussed by Schrodinger; and 5) complex self-replicating molecules can emerge spontaneously and relatively easily from simple chemical reaction systems through a sequence of transitions. Together, these results start to explain the origins of prebiotic evolution.
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