ArticleOrigins of life and evolution of the biosphere : the journal of the International Society for the Study of the Origin of Life2017
An Experimental Framework for Generating Evolvable Chemical Systems in the Laboratory.
Article in Origins of life and evolution of the biosphere : the journal of the International Society for the Study of the Origin of Life, 2017. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. An erratum has been issued. Cited by 13 papers.
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Who cites it
13 citing papers in PubMed.
- Degradation, Osmosis and the Emergence of Basic Functionalities in Abiotic Synthetic Life-like Chemical Systems.Life (Basel, Switzerland) · 2026Article
- Origins of life: the possible and the actual.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2025Article
- Evidence of Heritability in Prebiotically Realistic Membrane-Bound Systems.Life (Basel, Switzerland) · 2024Article
- The ecology-evolution continuum and the origin of life.Journal of the Royal Society, Interface · 2023Article
- Novel Apparatuses for Incorporating Natural Selection Processes into Origins-of-Life Experiments to Produce Adaptively Evolving Chemical Ecosystems.Life (Basel, Switzerland) · 2022Article
- The Prebiotic Kitchen: A Guide to Composing Prebiotic Soup Recipes to Test Origins of Life Hypotheses.Life (Basel, Switzerland) · 2021Review
- An ecological framework for the analysis of prebiotic chemical reaction networks.Journal of theoretical biology · 2020Article
- Eco-evolutionary dynamics of nested Darwinian populations and the emergence of community-level heredity.eLife · 2020Article
- Chemical Ecosystem Selection on Mineral Surfaces Reveals Long-Term Dynamics Consistent with the Spontaneous Emergence of Mutual Catalysis.Life (Basel, Switzerland) · 2019Article
- Emergence of Function and Selection from Recursively Programmed Polymerisation Reactions in Mineral Environments.Angewandte Chemie (International ed. in English) · 2019Article
- The origin and early evolution of life in chemical composition space.Journal of theoretical biology · 2018Article
- Systems protobiology: origin of life in lipid catalytic networks.Journal of the Royal Society, Interface · 2018Review
- Life's Late Digital Revolution and Why It Matters for the Study of the Origins of Life.Life (Basel, Switzerland) · 2017Article
Corrections and comments
- Erratum issued
Authors and funding
2 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Most experimental work on the origin of life has focused on either characterizing the chemical synthesis of particular biochemicals and their precursors or on designing simple chemical systems that manifest life-like properties such as self-propagation or adaptive evolution. Here we propose a new class of experiments, analogous to artificial ecosystem selection, where we select for spontaneously forming self-propagating chemical assemblages in the lab and then seek evidence of a response to that selection as a key indicator that life-like chemical systems have arisen. Since surfaces and surface metabolism likely played an important role in the origin of life, a key experimental challenge is to find conditions that foster nucleation and spread of chemical consortia on surfaces. We propose high-throughput screening of a diverse set of conditions in order to identify combinations of "food," energy sources, and mineral surfaces that foster the emergence of surface-associated chemical consortia that are capable of adaptive evolution. Identification of such systems would greatly advance our understanding of the emergence of self-propagating entities and the onset of adaptive evolution during the origin of life.
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