Theoretical origin of life; How to glue RNA to membranes (Introduction)

by David Turell , Thursday, August 13, 2015, 22:14 (3170 days ago) @ David Turell

All done in the lab by intelligent design. No word about the origin of the peptides, the RNA or the membranes.-http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/origin-of-life-first-cells-may-have-been-glued-together/?WT.mc_id=SA_DD_20150813-"Nobel laureate Jack Szostak and his team at the Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston, US, found that peptides just seven amino acids long or fewer can localise RNA to a basic cell membrane. ‘This mechanism is really quite simple and has been used in other fields to form RNA complexes with a variety of materials,' says Neha Kamat, the first author of the paper. ‘The simplicity of our system is what makes this mode of RNA-membrane association seem plausible on a primitive Earth.'-"The authors used small peptides containing both a hydrophobic group that associates with the membrane and a cationic group that electrostatically interacts with the negatively charged phosphate groups of RNA. Kamat explains that such peptides could have been present on the prebiotic Earth and may have helped to bring RNA and membranes together. ‘The peptides essentially act as a kind of glue to bind membranes and then attract and hold the RNA at the membrane surface,' she says.-"‘The first forms of life were likely to be simple cells containing systems of peptides and short strands of a nucleic acid such as RNA,' explains David Deamer, a chemist who works on membrane evolution at the University of California, Santa Cruz, US. ‘The results provide significant insight into the way that protocellular systems could have spontaneously assembled on the prebiotic Earth 4 billion years ago, an essential first step toward the origin of cellular life.'"-Comment: this all happened by chance?