ArticleJournal of theoretical biology2018
Evolutionary advantage of directional symmetry breaking in self-replicating polymers.
Article in Journal of theoretical biology, 2018. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 7 papers.
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
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Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
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Who cites it
7 citing papers in PubMed.
- Replication Rate-Information Storage Trade-Off Shapes Genome Architecture Across Domains.Journal of molecular evolution · 2026Article
- Non-enzymatic error correction in self-replicators without extraneous energy supply.Scientific reports · 2026Article
- On the Origin of Information Dynamics in Early Life.Life (Basel, Switzerland) · 2025Article
- High Nucleotide Skew Palindromic DNA Sequences Function as Potential Replication Origins due to their Unzipping Propensity.Journal of molecular evolution · 2024Article
- Prebiotic competition and evolution in self-replicating polynucleotides can explain the properties of DNA/RNA in modern living systems.BMC evolutionary biology · 2020Article
- Evolutionary advantage of anti-parallel strand orientation of duplex DNA.Scientific reports · 2020Article
- Chiral Monomers Ensure Orientational Specificity of Monomer Binding During Polymer Self-Replication.Journal of molecular evolution · 2018Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
2 authors.
Funding
Abstract
Due to the asymmetric nature of the nucleotides, the extant informational biomolecule, DNA, is constrained to replicate unidirectionally on a template. As a product of molecular evolution that sought to maximize replicative potential, DNA's unidirectional replication poses a mystery since symmetric bidirectional self-replicators obviously would replicate faster than unidirectional self-replicators and hence would have been evolutionarily more successful. Here we carefully examine the physico-chemical requirements for evolutionarily successful primordial self-replicators and theoretically show that at low monomer concentrations that possibly prevailed in the primordial oceans, asymmetric unidirectional self-replicators would have an evolutionary advantage over bidirectional self-replicators. The competing requirements of low and high kinetic barriers for formation and long lifetime of inter-strand bonds respectively are simultaneously satisfied through asymmetric kinetic influence of inter-strand bonds, resulting in evolutionarily successful unidirectional self-replicators. Within our model, circular strands, the configuration prefered by primitive life forms, have higher replicative potential compared to linear strands.
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