What Nanobacteria and Nanovesicles May Tell Us about the Origin of Life?

Abstract

In contemporary, established biology life is almost exclusively treated as a molecular phenomenon. Therefore, the mystery of the origin of life is sought in molecular terms and processes. But according to certain advanced researches and considerations, life has also other essential “ingredients”: active and diffused organized information and a specific physical as well as physicochemical state of matter characterized by long range order and coherent domains. These characteristics should also form the basis of the prebiotic evolution, the phase of more or less organized nano-and micro-vesicular systems that lead from abiotic to living systems. In this view, the complex molecular, physical and physicochemical order replaces the DNA molecule in its capability to maintain the stability of information complexity from generation to generation. Such systems were already found on the present day Earth and even within organisms and were also synthetically reproduced. They are called nanobacteria and in general nanovesicles or nanoparticles. They may represent an actual passage from non living forms to primitive organisms.