ArticleNature communications2017
The origin of a primordial genome through spontaneous symmetry breaking.
Article in Nature communications, 2017. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 26 papers.
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Who cites it
26 citing papers in PubMed.
- The key role of cheaters in the persistence of cooperation.BMC biology · 2026Article
- Origins of life: the possible and the actual.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2025Article
- Generalizing the central dogma as a cross-hierarchical principle of biology.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2025Review
- Scaling laws of bacterial and archaeal plasmids.Nature communications · 2025Article
- The key role of cheaters in the persistence of cooperation.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2024Article
- Formation of human kinship structures depending on population size and cultural mutation rate.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2024Article
- Evolution of RNA Viruses: Reasons for the Existence of Separate Plus, Minus, and Double-Strand Replication Strategies.Viruses · 2024Article
- Circular at the very beginning: on the initial genomes in the RNA world.RNA biology · 2024Article
- The RNA-DNA world and the emergence of DNA-encoded heritable traits.RNA biology · 2024Article
- The Ring World: Eversion of Small Double-Stranded Polynucleotide Circlets at the Origin of DNA Double Helix, RNA Polymerization, Triplet Code, Twenty Amino Acids, and Strand Asymmetry.International journal of molecular sciences · 2022Article
- Emergence of kinship structures and descent systems: multi-level evolutionary simulation and empirical data analysis.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2022Article
- A scaling law of multilevel evolution: how the balance between within- and among-collective evolution is determined.Genetics · 2022Article
- Evolution towards increasing complexity through functional diversification in a protocell model of the RNA world.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2021Article
- Turbulent coherent structures and early life below the Kolmogorov scale.Nature communications · 2020Article
- Evolution of kinship structures driven by marriage tie and competition.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2020Article
- Dynamics and stability in prebiotic information integration: an RNA World model from first principles.Scientific reports · 2020Article
- The origin of the central dogma through conflicting multilevel selection.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2019Article
- Reduced Local Symmetry in Lithium Compound LiAdvanced science (Weinheim, Baden-Wurttemberg, Germany) · 2019Article
- Physical foundations of biological complexity.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2018Article
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3 authors.
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Abstract
The heredity of a cell is provided by a small number of non-catalytic templates-the genome. How did genomes originate? Here, we demonstrate the possibility that genome-like molecules arise from symmetry breaking between complementary strands of self-replicating molecules. Our model assumes a population of protocells, each containing a population of self-replicating catalytic molecules. The protocells evolve towards maximising the catalytic activities of the molecules to increase their growth rates. Conversely, the molecules evolve towards minimising their catalytic activities to increase their intracellular relative fitness. These conflicting tendencies induce the symmetry breaking, whereby one strand of the molecules remains catalytic and increases its copy number (enzyme-like molecules), whereas the other becomes non-catalytic and decreases its copy number (genome-like molecules). This asymmetry increases the equilibrium cellular fitness by decreasing mutation pressure and increasing intracellular genetic drift. These results implicate conflicting multilevel evolution as a key cause of the origin of genetic complexity.Early molecules of life likely served both as templates and catalysts, raising the question of how functionally distinct genomes and enzymes arose. Here, the authors show that conflict between evolution at the molecular and cellular levels can drive functional differentiation of the two strands of self-replicating molecules and lead to copy number differences between the two.
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