Abstract
In recent years, an extension of the Darwinian framework is being considered for the study of prebiotic chemical evolution, shifting the attention from homogeneous populations of naked molecular species to populations of heterogeneous, compartmentalized and functionally integrated assemblies of molecules. Several implications of this shift of perspective are analysed in this critical review, both in terms of the individual units, which require an adequate characterization as self-maintaining systems with an internal organization, and also in relation to their collective and long-term evolutionary dynamics, based on competition, collaboration and selection processes among those complex individuals. On these lines, a concrete proposal for the set of molecular control mechanisms that must be coupled to bring about autonomous functional systems, at the interface between chemistry and biology, is provided.
Highlights
About a century and a half ago, in his book On the Origin of Species, Charles R
This widespread conception is supported by two breakthroughs from last half-century molecular biology: (i) the development of in vitro molecular evolution technologies, which allowed to prove that populations of biopolymers with template properties could, change in time under artificial selective pressure [6,7,8,9]; and (ii) the discovery of ribozymes [10,11], which demonstrated the catalytic capacities of RNAs and, thereby, the dual role that this type of macromolecule might have played at the onset of life
The later stages of prebiotic evolution are relevant, but lie outside the scope of the present contribution. In this prospective critical review, we have focused on the first steps of the process of the origins of life, which have important implications for subsequent stages
Summary
About a century and a half ago, in his book On the Origin of Species, Charles R. Self-replicating RNA (or RNA-like) molecules started competing for a limited amount of resources (i.e. nucleotides or analogous monomers) in their local environment, and some form of NS already began operating at that chemical level [3,4,5] This widespread conception is supported by two breakthroughs from last half-century molecular biology: (i) the development of in vitro molecular evolution technologies, which allowed to prove that populations of biopolymers with template properties could, change in time under artificial selective pressure [6,7,8,9]; and (ii) the discovery of ribozymes [10,11], which demonstrated the catalytic capacities of RNAs and, thereby, the dual role that this type of macromolecule might have played at the onset of life. Despite the expected difficulties in establishing the ‘liveliness’ of these intermediate chemical systems, the necessity to start integrating organizational and evolutionary accounts of those kinds of complex (pre-bio)molecular phenomena is becoming less and less controversial, and that is precisely the area on which we focus this short critical review or perspective article
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