From chemical metabolism to life: the origin of the genetic coding process

Looking for origins is so much rooted in ideology that most studies reflect opinions that fail to explore the first realistic scenarios. To be sure, trying to understand the origins of life should be based on what we know of current chemistry in the solar system and beyond. There, amino acids and ve...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Beilstein journal of organic chemistry 2017-06, Vol.13 (1), p.1119-1135
Main Author: Danchin, Antoine
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
algorithmic complexity
Algorithms
Astronomers
Carbon dioxide
Chemistry
Coenzymes
Complementarity
Computers
Genetic code
Genomes
Information processing
Information sources
Metabolic pathways
Novels
Nucleotides
Operating systems
Organisms
phagocytosis: reticulum
Review
Turing Machine
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Summary:Looking for origins is so much rooted in ideology that most studies reflect opinions that fail to explore the first realistic scenarios. To be sure, trying to understand the origins of life should be based on what we know of current chemistry in the solar system and beyond. There, amino acids and very small compounds such as carbon dioxide, dihydrogen or dinitrogen and their immediate derivatives are ubiquitous. Surface-based chemical metabolism using these basic chemicals is the most likely beginning in which amino acids, coenzymes and phosphate-based small carbon molecules were built up. Nucleotides, and of course RNAs, must have come to being much later. As a consequence, the key question to account for life is to understand how chemical metabolism that began with amino acids progressively shaped into a coding process involving RNAs. Here I explore the role of building up complementarity rules as the first information-based process that allowed for the genetic code to emerge, after RNAs were substituted to surfaces to carry over the basic metabolic pathways that drive the pursuit of life.
ISSN:1860-5397
2195-951X
1860-5397
DOI:10.3762/bjoc.13.111