A Non-paradoxical Pathway for the Chemical Evolution Toward the Most Primitive RNA-Based Life-like System

Abstract

Although the RNA world hypothesis is an important hypothesis for the origin-of-life study, it involves drawbacks that should be evaluated. These drawbacks involve unknown points. First, several steps from inorganic materials to the functional RNA molecules are not yet clarified. Second, the simulation experiments for the prebiotic accumulation of RNA seem to be incompatible with the Hadean Earth environments. Third, the actual feature of the RNA world has not been identified. Here, we carried out possible simulation experiments for the chemical evolution of RNA using our hydrothermal flow reactor systems. We recently proposed the two-gene hypothesis for the emergence of life-like systems from simple chemical networks. Following the same methodology, here, we attempted to combine the knowledge obtained from experimental data on the chemical evolution of RNA and the theoretical work to deduce a realistic feature of the RNA-based life-like system.