Theoretical origin of life; RNA plus peptides (Introduction)

by David Turell , Saturday, December 23, 2017, 00:17 (2527 days ago) @ David Turell

I have no idea where these complex molecules first came from, but part of the point of the review article is RNA by itself is an inadequate start:

https://www.quantamagazine.org/the-end-of-the-rna-world-is-near-biochemists-argue-20171...

"Recent papers published in Biosystems and Molecular Biology and Evolution delineated why the RNA world hypothesis does not provide a sufficient foundation for the evolutionary events that followed. Instead, said Charles Carter, a structural biologist at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, who co-authored the papers, the model represents “an expedient proposal.” “There’s no way that a single polymer could carry out all of the necessary processes we now characterize as part of life,” he added.

"And that single polymer certainly couldn’t be RNA, according to his team’s studies. The main objection to the molecule concerns catalysis: Some research has shown that for life to take hold, the mystery polymer would have had to coordinate the rates of chemical reactions that could differ in speed by as much as 20 orders of magnitude. Even if RNA could somehow do this in the prebiotic world, its capabilities as a catalyst would have been adapted to the searing temperatures — around 100 degrees Celsius — that abounded on early Earth. Once the planet started to cool, Carter claims, RNA wouldn’t have been able to evolve and keep up the work of synchronization. Before long, the symphony of chemical reactions would have fallen into disarray.

"Perhaps most importantly, an RNA-only world could not explain the emergence of the genetic code, which nearly all living organisms today use to translate genetic information into proteins. The code takes each of the 64 possible three-nucleotide RNA sequences and maps them to one of the 20 amino acids used to build proteins. Finding a set of rules robust enough to do that would take far too long with RNA alone, said Peter Wills, Carter’s co-author at the University of Auckland in New Zealand — if the RNA world could even reach that point, which he deemed highly unlikely. In Wills’ view, RNA might have been able to catalyze its own formation, making it “chemically reflexive,” but it lacked what he called “computational reflexivity.”

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"Nature had to find a different route, a better shortcut to the genetic code. Carter and Wills think they’ve uncovered that shortcut. It depends on a tight feedback loop — one that would not have developed from RNA alone but instead from a peptide-RNA complex.

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"At the center of their theory are 20 “loading” molecules called aminoacyl-tRNA synthetases. These catalytic enzymes allow RNA to bond with specific amino acids in keeping with the rules of the genetic code. “In a sense, the genetic code is ‘written’ in the specificity of the active sites” of those enzymes, said Jannie Hofmeyr, a biochemist at Stellenbosch University in South Africa, who was not involved in the study.

***

"To answer these questions, theories abound that move far beyond the RNA world. In fact, some scientists take an approach precisely opposite to that of Carter and Wills: They think instead that the earliest stages of life did not need to begin with anything resembling the kind of chemistry seen today. Doron Lancet, a genomics researcher at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel, posits an alternative theory that rests on assemblies of lipids that catalyze the entrance and exit of various molecules. Information is carried not by genetic sequences, but rather by the lipid composition of such assemblies."

Comment: I've ignored much of their fantastical proposition. It is easy to have reasonable fun and games with proposed specialized organic molecules, but how did these complex organic molecules sudenly appear on a hot and rocky mainly inorganic Earth? They see the RNA difficulties and that is what I wanted to present. Life is a miracle unil proven otherwise.