On the Origin of Life and Evolution of Living Systems from a World of Biological Membranes

2020 ◽  
pp. 169-201
Author(s):  
Aditya Mittal ◽  
Suneyna Bansal ◽  
Anandkumar Madhavjibhai Changani
Keyword(s):  
Origin Of Life ◽  
Biological Membranes ◽  
Living Systems ◽  
The Origin Of Life

General discussion after session V

1988 ◽  
Vol 325 (1587) ◽  
pp. 611-618 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Origin Of Life ◽  
Time Perspective ◽  
Applied Mathematics ◽  
Building Blocks ◽  
Living Systems ◽  
Organic Chemical ◽  
General Terms ◽  
The Earth ◽  
The Origin Of Life ◽  
Emergence Of Life

N. C. Wickramasinghe ( Department of Applied Mathematics and Astronomy, University College, Cardiff, U. K. ). The question of the origin of life is, of course, one of the most important scientific questions and it is also one of the most difficult. One is inevitably faced here with a situation where there are very few empirical facts of direct relevance and perhaps no facts relating to the actual transition from organic material to material that can even remotely be described as living. The time perspective of events that relate to this problem has already been presented by Dr Chang. Uncertainty still persists as to the actual first moment of the origin or the emergence of life on the Earth. At some time between 3800 and 3300 Ma BP the first microscopic living systems seem to have emerged. There is a definite moment in time corresponding to a sudden appearance of cellular-type living systems. Now, traditionally the evolution of carbonaceous compounds which led to the emergence of life on Earth could be divided into three principal steps and I shall just remind you what those steps are. The first step is the production of chemical building blocks that lead to the origin of the organic molecules necessary as a prerequisite for the evolution of life. Step two can be described in general terms as prebiotic evolution, the arrangement of these chemical units into some kind of sequence of precursor systems that come almost up to life but not quite; and then stage three is the early biological evolution which actually effects the transition from proto-cellular organic-type forms into truly cellular living systems. The transition is from organic chemistry, prebiotic chemistry to biochemistry. Those are the three principal stages that have been defined by traditional workers in the field, the people who, as Dr Chang said, have had the courage to make these queries and attempt to answer them. Ever since the classic experiments where organic materials were synthesized in the laboratory a few decades back, it was thought that the first step, the production of organic chemical units, is important for the origin of life on the Earth, and that this had to take place in some location on the Earth itself.

scholarly journals LIFE AS WE DO NOT KNOW IT

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
soumya banerjee
Keyword(s):  
Information Processing ◽  
Computational Model ◽  
Origin Of Life ◽  
Critical Role ◽  
Life Forms ◽  
Living Systems ◽  
Computational Simulations ◽  
The Origin Of Life ◽  
Carbon Based

Information plays a critical role in complex biologicalsystems. This article proposes a role for information processing in questions around the origin of life and suggests how computational simulations may yield insights into questions related to the origin of life. Such a computational model of the origin of life would unify thermodynamics with information processing and we would gain an appreciation of why proteins and nucleotides evolved as the substrate of computation andinformation processing in living systems that we see on Earth. Answers to questions like these may give us insights into noncarbon based forms of life that we could search for outside Earth. I hypothesize that carbon-based life forms are only one amongst a continuum of life-like systems in the universe.Investigations into the role of computational substrates that allow information processing is important and could yield insights into:1) novel non-carbon based computational substrates thatmay have “life-like” properties, and2) how life may have actually originated from non-life onEarth. Life may exist as a continuum between non-life and life and we may have to revise our notion of life and how common it is in the universe.Looking at life or life-like phenomena through the lens ofinformation theory may yield a broader view of life.

scholarly journals Molecules, Information and the Origin of Life: What Is Next?

Molecules ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 26 (4) ◽  
pp. 1003
Author(s):  
Salvatore Chirumbolo ◽  
Antonio Vella
Keyword(s):  
Origin Of Life ◽  
Water Structure ◽  
Dissipative Structures ◽  
Living Systems ◽  
Complex Nature ◽  
Experimental Science ◽  
New Paradigm ◽  
Information Dynamics ◽  
Long Time ◽  
The Origin Of Life

How life did originate and what is life, in its deepest foundation? The texture of life is known to be held by molecules and their chemical-physical laws, yet a thorough elucidation of the aforementioned questions still stands as a puzzling challenge for science. Focusing solely on molecules and their laws has indirectly consolidated, in the scientific knowledge, a mechanistic (reductionist) perspective of biology and medicine. This occurred throughout the long historical path of experimental science, affecting subsequently the onset of the many theses and speculations about the origin of life and its maintenance. Actually, defining what is life, asks for a novel epistemology, a ground on which living systems’ organization, whose origin is still questioned via chemistry, physics and even philosophy, may provide a new key to focus onto the complex nature of the human being. In this scenario, many issues, such as the role of information and water structure, have been long time neglected from the theoretical basis on the origin of life and marginalized as a kind of scenic backstage. On the contrary, applied science and technology went ahead on considering molecules as the sole leading components in the scenery. Water physics and information dynamics may have a role in living systems much more fundamental than ever expected. Can an organism be simply explained by a mechanistic view of its nature or we need “something else”? Probably, we can earn sound foundations about life by simply changing our prejudicial view about living systems simply as complex, highly ordered machines. In this manuscript we would like to reappraise many fundamental aspects of molecular and chemical biology and reading them through a new paradigm, which includes Prigogine’s dissipative structures and informational dissipation (Shannon dissipation). This would provide readers with insightful clues about how biology and chemistry may be thoroughly revised, referring to new models, such as informational dissipation. We trust they are enabled to address a straightforward contribution in elucidating what life is for science. This overview is not simply a philosophical speculation, but it would like to affect deeply our way to conceive and describe the foundations of organisms’ life, providing intriguing suggestions for readers in the field.

scholarly journals Astrobiology: Towards an Understanding of the Emergence of Life in the Universe

2004 ◽  
Vol 213 ◽  
pp. 245-254 ◽  
Author(s):  
Antonio Lazcano
Keyword(s):  
Origin Of Life ◽  
Evolutionary Biology ◽  
Living Systems ◽  
Spontaneous Generation ◽  
Terrestrial Environment ◽  
Random Events ◽  
The Origin Of Life ◽  
Emergence Of Life ◽  
Considerable Detail ◽  
The Universe

Long before the idea of spontaneous generation was incorporated by JeanBaptiste de Lamarck into evolutionary biology to explain the first emergence of life, the possibility that other planets were inhabited had been discussed, sometimes in considerable detail, by scientists and philosophers alike (Lazcano 2001). More often than not, these were speculations that rested on the idea of a uniform universe but with little or no empirical basis. Today our approaches to the issue of life in the Universe have changed dramatically; neither the formation of planets nor the origin of life are seen as the result of inscrutable random events, but rather as natural outcomes of evolutionary events. The interconnection between these two processes is evident: understanding the formation of planets has major implications for our understanding of the early terrestrial environment, and therefore for the origin of living systems.

scholarly journals Structural Responses of Model Biomembranes to Mars-relevant Salts

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Simon Kriegler ◽  
Marius Herzog ◽  
Rosario Oliva ◽  
Stewart Gault ◽  
Charles Cockell ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Origin Of Life ◽  
Lipid Membranes ◽  
Living Systems ◽  
Structural Responses ◽  
The Origin Of Life

Lipid membranes are a key component of contemporary living systems and are thought to have been essential to the origin of life. Most research on membranes has focused on situations...

Reversible suspension of metabolism and the origin of life

1968 ◽  
Vol 171 (1022) ◽  
pp. 43-57 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Origin Of Life ◽  
Environmental Conditions ◽  
Living Systems ◽  
The Origin Of Life

This paper is concerned to show that the capacity to tolerate a total suspension of metabolism (cryptobiosis) is a primitive characteristic of protoplasm. It is a characteristic that makes it possible to visualize a much wider range of environmental conditions for the possible origin of the first living systems. The characteristics of the cryptobiotic state are first noted, certain special features of cryptobiosis revealed by experiments on complex multicellular animals are then described, and finally the relevance of all this to theories about the origin of life are briefly noted.

scholarly journals The Generalized Definition of Life

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
vivek kumar
Keyword(s):  
Origin Of Life ◽  
Life Forms ◽  
Living Systems ◽  
Definition Of Life ◽  
The Origin Of Life ◽  
Definition Of ◽  
Life On Earth

In this article, I propose and discuss a new definition of life. This new definition considers reproduction and evolution as major aspects of life. It brings into consideration a variety of other life forms like inorganic life, etc. In this study, I aim to present the possibility of various life forms and some of their properties, which might help understand the origin of life on earth and the existence of life in other parts of the cosmos. This new proposed definition of life is independent of the mode of evolution and general enough to consider all potential life forms. This article uses NASA’s definition of life as a structure to derive this generalized definition of life. Finding and exploring new living systems will definitely be very helpful in understanding the aspects of life. In order to explain some complex life forms, a new concept of addition of living systems is introduced in this article. This study underscores the need for further work to understand the origin and properties of living systems.

scholarly journals The hallmarks of living systems: towards creating artificial cells

2018 ◽  
Vol 8 (5) ◽  
pp. 20180023 ◽  
Author(s):  
N. Amy Yewdall ◽  
Alexander F. Mason ◽  
Jan C. M. van Hest
Keyword(s):  
Information Processing ◽  
Origin Of Life ◽  
New Technologies ◽  
Energy Transduction ◽  
Living Systems ◽  
Artificial Cells ◽  
Bottom Up ◽  
Biological Phenomena ◽  
The Origin Of Life ◽  
Life On Earth

Despite the astonishing diversity and complexity of living systems, they all share five common hallmarks: compartmentalization, growth and division, information processing, energy transduction and adaptability. In this review, we give not only examples of how cells satisfy these requirements for life and the ways in which it is possible to emulate these characteristics in engineered platforms, but also the gaps that remain to be bridged. The bottom-up synthesis of life-like systems continues to be driven forward by the advent of new technologies, by the discovery of biological phenomena through their transplantation to experimentally simpler constructs and by providing insights into one of the oldest questions posed by mankind, the origin of life on Earth.

scholarly journals A framework for parsing heritable information

2020 ◽  
Vol 17 (165) ◽  
pp. 20200154 ◽  
Author(s):  
Antony M. Jose
Keyword(s):  
Small Molecules ◽  
Origin Of Life ◽  
Living Systems ◽  
Gene Sequences ◽  
Amount Of Information ◽  
Relevant Property ◽  
Complex Development ◽  
Sensor Property ◽  
The Origin Of Life ◽  
Successive Generations

Living systems transmit heritable information using the replicating gene sequences and the cycling regulators assembled around gene sequences. Here, I develop a framework for heredity and development that includes the cycling regulators parsed in terms of what an organism can sense about itself and its environment by defining entities, their sensors and the sensed properties. Entities include small molecules (ATP, ions, metabolites, etc.), macromolecules (individual proteins, RNAs, polysaccharides, etc.) and assemblies of molecules. While concentration may be the only relevant property measured by sensors for small molecules, multiple properties that include concentration, sequence, conformation and modification may all be measured for macromolecules and assemblies. Each configuration of these entities and sensors that is recreated in successive generations in a given environment thus specifies a potentially vast amount of information driving complex development in each generation. This entity–sensor–property framework explains how sensors limit the number of distinguishable states, how distinct molecular configurations can be functionally equivalent and how regulation of sensors prevents detection of some perturbations. Overall, this framework is a useful guide for understanding how life evolves and how the storage of information has itself evolved with complexity since before the origin of life.

The Tempo and mode(S) of Prebiotic Evolution

1997 ◽  
Vol 161 ◽  
pp. 419-429 ◽  
Author(s):  
Antonio Lazcano
Keyword(s):  
Origin Of Life ◽  
Organic Compounds ◽  
Biological Evolution ◽  
Current Evidence ◽  
Early Diversification ◽  
Time Period ◽  
The Galaxy ◽  
History Of ◽  
Widespread Phenomenon ◽  
The Origin Of Life

AbstractDifferent current ideas on the origin of life are critically examined. Comparison of the now fashionable FeS/H2S pyrite-based autotrophic theory of the origin of life with the heterotrophic viewpoint suggest that the later is still the most fertile explanation for the emergence of life. However, the theory of chemical evolution and heterotrophic origins of life requires major updating, which should include the abandonment of the idea that the appearance of life was a slow process involving billions of years. Stability of organic compounds and the genetics of bacteria suggest that the origin and early diversification of life took place in a time period of the order of 10 million years. Current evidence suggest that the abiotic synthesis of organic compounds may be a widespread phenomenon in the Galaxy and may have a deterministic nature. However, the history of the biosphere does not exhibits any obvious trend towards greater complexity or «higher» forms of life. Therefore, the role of contingency in biological evolution should not be understimated in the discussions of the possibilities of life in the Universe.

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