Secret Spices and primal gene soup:

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paddoboy

Valued Senior Member
Was the secret spice in primal gene soup a thickener?
October 10, 2016


The original recipe for gene soup may have been simple—rain, a jumble of common molecules, warm sunshine, and nighttime cooling. Then add a pinch of thickener.

The last ingredient may have helped gene-like strands to copy themselves in puddles for the first time ever, billions of years ago when Earth was devoid of life, researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology have found. Their novel discoveries add to a growing body of evidence that suggests first life may have evolved with relative ease, here and possibly elsewhere in the universe.

And they offer a straightforward answer to a gnawing 50-year-old question: How did precursors to the present-day genetic code first duplicate themselves before the existence of enzymes that are indispensable to that process today?



Read more at: http://phys.org/news/2016-10-secret-spice-primal-gene-soup.html#jCp
 
http://www.nature.com/nchem/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/nchem.2628.html

A viscous solvent enables information transfer from gene-length nucleic acids in a model prebiotic replication cycle:

Abstract:
Many hypotheses concerning the nature of early life assume that genetic information was once transferred through the template-directed synthesis of RNA, before the emergence of coded enzymes. However, attempts to demonstrate enzyme-free, template-directed synthesis of nucleic acids have been limited by ‘strand inhibition’, whereby transferring information from a template strand in the presence of its complementary strand is inhibited by the stability of the template duplex. Here, we use solvent viscosity to circumvent strand inhibition, demonstrating information transfer from a gene-length template (>300 nt) within a longer (545 bp or 3 kb) duplex. These results suggest that viscous environments on the prebiotic Earth, generated periodically by water evaporation, could have facilitated nucleic acid replication—particularly of long, structured sequences such as ribozymes. Our approach works with DNA and RNA, suggesting that viscosity-mediated replication is possible for a range of genetic polymers, perhaps even for informational polymers that may have preceded RNA.
 
paddoboy said:
Was the secret spice in primal gene soup a thickener?
October 10, 2016


The original recipe for gene soup may have been simple—rain, a jumble of common molecules, warm sunshine, and nighttime cooling. Then add a pinch of thickener.

The last ingredient may have helped gene-like strands to copy themselves in puddles for the first time ever, billions of years ago when Earth was devoid of life, researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology have found. Their novel discoveries add to a growing body of evidence that suggests first life may have evolved with relative ease, here and possibly elsewhere in the universe.

And they offer a straightforward answer to a gnawing 50-year-old question: How did precursors to the present-day genetic code first duplicate themselves before the existence of enzymes that are indispensable to that process today?



Read more at: http://phys.org/news/2016-10-secret-spice-primal-gene-soup.html#jCp
Click to expand...

What a fantasy, that comes probably from a person that is not very familiar with biochemistry.
 
timojin said:
What a fantasy, that comes probably from a person that is not very familiar with biochemistry.
Click to expand...
But really timojin, don't you believe its a good idea to read the paper first?
You never know, you may even learn something. :rolleyes:
 
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