Abstract
Recombination is a common event in nature, with examples in physics, chemistry, and biology. This process is characterized by the spontaneous reorganization of structural units to form new entities. Upon reorganization, the complexity of the overall system can change. In particular the components of the system can now experience a new response to externally applied selection criteria, such that the evolutionary trajectory of the system is altered. In this work we explore the link between chemical and biological forms of recombination. We estimate how the net system complexity changes, through analysis of RNA-RNA recombination and by mathematical modeling. Our results underscore the importance of recombination in the origins of life on the Earth and its subsequent evolutionary divergence.
Highlights
Recombination is a general process in which multi-component entities physically interact and mutually exchange components to create chimeric products, or offspring
In this paper we examine the evidence of the early origin of recombination and propose a transition mechanism from an RNA World to cellular life based on recombination processes
We begin by focusing on the benefit recombination would have had in building up longer RNA strands from shorter ones during the RNA World, a critical obstacle nascent life would have had to overcome in order to extract complexity out of the informational chaos available from prebiotic chemistry [17]
Summary
Recombination is a general process in which multi-component entities physically interact and mutually exchange components to create chimeric products, or offspring. In this paper we examine the evidence of the early origin of recombination and propose a transition mechanism from an RNA World to cellular life based on recombination processes. We provide the big picture to understand why it is important to understand the reason for the evolutionary origin of recombination, and, whether that reason is still the driving force of the widespread and diverse recombination mechanisms. In the second section we discuss evolutionary pressures that may have played a role in the actual chemical origins of recombination, and which supported possible recombination mechanisms during the RNA World. In the third section we highlight the diversification of the recombination mechanisms with the advent of cellular life. In the last section we discuss the transition of naked genes during the RNA World to genes/genomes during cellular life, in which recombination plays the major role
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