Can Peptide Droplets Explain The Emergence Of The First Living Organisms On Earth?

The missing link isn’t a not-yet-discovered fossil, after all. It’s a tiny, self-replicating globule called a coacervate droplet, developed by two researchers in Japan to represent the evolution of chemistry into biology.

“Chemical evolution was first proposed in the 1920s as the idea that life first originated with the formation of macromolecules from simple small molecules, and those macromolecules formed molecular assemblies that could proliferate,” said first-author Muneyuki Matsuo, assistant professor of chemistry in the Graduate School of Integrated Sciences for Life at Hiroshima University.

“Since then, many studies have been conducted to verify the RNA world hypothesis — where only self-replicating genetic material existed prior to the evolution of DNA and proteins — experimentally. However, the origin of molecular assemblies that proliferate from small molecules has remained a mystery for about a hundred years since the advent of the chemical evolution scenario. It has been the missing link between chemistry and biology in the origin of life.”

Read more here

ww.ancientpages.com - All about the ancient world. Explore ancient mysteries, history, secret symbols, mythology. Learn about ancient history facts & latest archaeology news.

Source: https://www.ancientpages.com/2021/10/20/can-peptide-droplets-explain-the-emergence-of-the-first-living-organisms-on-earth/