ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2010
Lack of evolvability in self-sustaining autocatalytic networks constraints metabolism-first scenarios for the origin of life.
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2010. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 66 papers.
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66 citing papers in PubMed, 187 citations in OpenAlex.
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- Opinion: The Key Steps in the Origin of Life to the Formation of the Eukaryotic Cell.Life (Basel, Switzerland) · 2024Review
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- Small-molecule autocatalysis drives compartment growth, competition and reproduction.Nature chemistry · 2024Article
- On the Emergence of Autonomous Chemical Systems through Dissipation Kinetics.Life (Basel, Switzerland) · 2023Article
- Energy-harnessing problem solving of primordial life: Modeling the emergence of catalytic host-nested parasite life cycles.PloS one · 2023Article
- From the origin of life to pandemics: emergent phenomena in complex systems.Philosophical transactions. Series A, Mathematical, physical, and engineering sciences · 2022Article
- Undefining life's biochemistry: implications for abiogenesis.Journal of the Royal Society, Interface · 2022Review
- Cysteine and iron accelerate the formation of ribose-5-phosphate, providing insights into the evolutionary origins of the metabolic network structure.PLoS biology · 2021Article
- Evolutionary Aspects of the Oxido-Reductive Network of Methylglyoxal.Journal of molecular evolution · 2021Article
- Automated Exploration of Prebiotic Chemical Reaction Space: Progress and Perspectives.Life (Basel, Switzerland) · 2021Review
- Natural Selection beyond Life? A Workshop Report.Life (Basel, Switzerland) · 2021Article
- When Is a Reaction Network a Metabolism? Criteria for Simple Metabolisms That Support Growth and Division of Protocells.Life (Basel, Switzerland) · 2021Article
- Self-Reproduction and Darwinian Evolution in Autocatalytic Chemical Reaction Systems.Life (Basel, Switzerland) · 2021Review
- The chemical brain hypothesis for the origin of nervous systems.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2021Article
6 more citing papers are in PubMed but not listed here.
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Authors and funding
3 authors at 3 institutions in 3 countries.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
A basic property of life is its capacity to experience Darwinian evolution. The replicator concept is at the core of genetics-first theories of the origin of life, which suggest that self-replicating oligonucleotides or their similar ancestors may have been the first "living" systems and may have led to the evolution of an RNA world. But problems with the nonenzymatic synthesis of biopolymers and the origin of template replication have spurred the alternative metabolism-first scenario, where self-reproducing and evolving proto-metabolic networks are assumed to have predated self-replicating genes. Recent theoretical work shows that "compositional genomes" (i.e., the counts of different molecular species in an assembly) are able to propagate compositional information and can provide a setup on which natural selection acts. Accordingly, if we stick to the notion of replicator as an entity that passes on its structure largely intact in successive replications, those macromolecular aggregates could be dubbed "ensemble replicators" (composomes) and quite different from the more familiar genes and memes. In sharp contrast with template-dependent replication dynamics, we demonstrate here that replication of compositional information is so inaccurate that fitter compositional genomes cannot be maintained by selection and, therefore, the system lacks evolvability (i.e., it cannot substantially depart from the asymptotic steady-state solution already built-in in the dynamical equations). We conclude that this fundamental limitation of ensemble replicators cautions against metabolism-first theories of the origin of life, although ancient metabolic systems could have provided a stable habitat within which polymer replicators later evolved.
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