17 ms·
RNA forms on basalt lava glass in the presence of nucleoside triphosphates
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- JPLeRouzic 4y agoHow this fits in the RNA world hypothesis?
- gus_massa 4y agoIt's in favor of the RNA word hypothesis, because it gives a possible explanation of how the first RNA was formed. IIRC there are other proposed methods to produce RNA. IIUC this method assumes that there are many triphosphates floating around, that is possible but needs another explanation. So IMHO it's just a tiny step in the right direction, but not a "breakthrough" like some press articles claim.
- JPLeRouzic 4y agoThanks for the explanation!
- Scramblejams 4y agoMakes me wonder how abundant basalt lava glass is on planets in the goldilocks zone.
- AndrewDucker 4y agoCritically, formed from ribonucleoside triphosphates. This is an important step, but there are others needed to give us the complete chain of generation.
- BiteCode_dev 4y agoYes, but it does hint that spontaneous emergence of basic life building blocks is a more and more viable hypothesis. And that, given similar conditions, other worlds could develop ecosystems analogue to ours.
- sockpuppet_12 4y agoTheorising that high carbon steel can form by mistake in some scenarios is no where even remotely close to the information management necessary to spontaneously create a tesla. And even a Tesla is no where remotely close to the organic cell. The smallest known functional, and most importantly, stable biological unit. Even if rna is formed, what will read it?
- BiteCode_dev 4y agoThose are good questions, but having questions doesn't decrease my interest, it just gives it context.
- gus_massa 4y ago> Even if rna is formed, what will read it? That's the interesting part of RNA. You don't need a reader! RNA can act like an enzyme. They can fold and form strange shapes and have some "sticky" parts, so they can replace the activity of enzymes. Enzymes made of proteins are more efficient, so now most(all?) enzymes are made of proteins. But in the initial form of life perhaps enzymes were just a short RNA strip. RNA can be copied. They can be in a single strain, and they can collect the parts [1] and make an inverse copy, and then separate. DNA is better with a lot of helper enzymes is much better, but in the initial form of life perhaps RNA is good enough. None of these steps need a reader, so perhaps they can form an initial and very inefficient life(almost-life) form. [1] the parts: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nucleoside_triphosphate https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nucleoside_triphosphate
- sockpuppet_12 4y agoThats fascinating and I appreciate knowing that. About this: > None of these steps need a reader, so perhaps they can form an initial and very inefficient life(almost-life) form. May I ask, have you ever considered if any of these systems that you're researching or investigating are the product of deliberate engineering rather than random chance?
- oyebenny 4y agoFrom the ashes we rise
- lynguist 4y agoYour comment made me think about what is the principal point of evolution: New ideas/species/functions are not born from competition, they are formed by mixing up.
- BiteCode_dev 4y agoAnd filtering.
- doctoboggan 4y agoThis is a very interesting result. Does anyone know how likely ribonucleoside triphosphates are to be formed in young earth conditions? What is the state of the research on this topic? It seems like this is a pre-print but if it stands up to peer review this would appear to be a big step forward in our understanding of abiogenesis, and would seem to be good evidence for the RNA world hypothesis. I always kind of hoped abiogenesis happened multiple times on multiple worlds, rather than once and then spread through panspermia. This result seems to indicate it could have happened here.
- greenbit 4y agoWouldn't it be fascinating if it happened multiple times right here on earth, even.
- 41b696ef1113 4y agoEven if it were possible to happen repeatedly wouldn't the prior generation be immediately able to out compete (immediately consume) the nascently developed life?
- Cannabat 4y agoI believe submission title is inaccurate: > This study shows that various mafic rock glasses almost certainly present on the surface of the Hadean Earth catalyze the formation of polyribonucleic acid in water starting from nucleoside triphosphates. > Thus, the prebiotic relevance of this result very much depends on whether nucleoside triphosphates were present to Hadean impact fields. In other words, RNA spontaneously forms on basalt lava glass in the presence of nucleoside triphosphates. These are compounds for which there is no known prebiologic formation process - we only know of nucleoside triphosphates as compounds created by living organisms. Disclaimer: I am not an expert in this area, I just read the article.
- natch 4y ago>we only know of nucleoside triphosphates as compounds created by living organisms That is your claim. But the article claims, and I'm not saying it's true, I also am not an expert… but it's an interesting claim: "many proposals are emerging describing how triphosphates might have been made on the Hadean Earth"
- Cannabat 4y agoSure is an interesting claim. Key words include "proposals", "emerging", and "might" - sounds like we have not demonstrated any of those processes just yet, but the people who know what they are talking about think abiogenesis is possible.
- dylan604 4y agoIn all scientific research someone comes up with a theory that proposes an idea as it emerges that might do something. It is science's job to the then test that theory to either prove or disprove it. The problem is that from my armchair quarterback role that these theories are getting submitted and then published in the media before any testing has been done. Which can be okay as maybe that will bring it to the attention of someone in a position to actually do the testing. However, it tends to come off sound like it is fact or widely accepted as true prematurely by some of the shoddy reporting
- greenbit 4y agoI think the whole RNA thing is a bit over hyped. People like RNA because it looks somewhat like computer code, and our technology is just smitten with computers, these recent decades. And right along with that, it makes for such a painfully obvious way to implement inheritance and natural selection, a way to make genes. But I think our focus is too narrow, we should think bigger than just obvious solutions. Now, it's great if the early oceans were awash with RNA, but does RNA exploit energy gradients on its own? The idea of all this random RNA just sloshing around, using nothing more than entropy, behaving as genes and inventing all the rest of it, just seems a little cart-before-the-horse. What about metabolism-first? Is fire alive? It has many properties of life but, critically, lacks self regulation and heritability. Burns everything and goes out. Imagine though, a system of enzymes that can assimilate various specific kinds of molecules, and sustain production of those enzymes. Imagine this contained, compartmentalized in some way. Dynamically not much more complicated than simple fire, but crucially, the enzymes can be said to be inherited. These are not 'genes' as such, these are the actual machinery. It should be possible for natural selection to act on 'life' no more complicated than that. And that kind of system could then take find uses for RNA. (And yes, the enzymes I refer to could be realized as RNA, but acting as the enzymes directly, not merely describing them, and this would confer some major benefits)
- tetris11 4y agoIt's not quite a random soup though, RNA folding usually tries to minimize the energy exerted during the folding and binding process, no? Isn't this similar with fire, and enzymes, and other unconscious actors that appear to exhibit complex behavoirs but are just minimising some energy gradient?
- greenbit 4y agoI'm just painting broad strokes, trying to avoid the TL;DR threshold. But re energy gradients, I'm talking about the difference between being able to tap into potential energy in the environment, vs just seeking some kind of equilibrium. Sure, a freshly crafted sequence of amino acids will find a shape to minimize the internal energy, and so you can say there's a gradient there, but that's different from taking in H2S and CO2 (or what have you) from the environment and reacting them to liberate non-thermal energy that can be used to get things done.
- begueradj 4y agoI will read this later
- photochemsyn 4y agoInteresting work. One thing to keep in mind is that early environments were anoxic, as free oxygen only arose after the development of photosynthesis on a global scale. This should have made abiotic synthesis relatively easier as oxygen acts as kind of bleach (production of OH radical etc.), so it's likely early oceans were awash with a wide variety of organic molecules, as well as tons of dissolved iron and sulfur species, likely phosphorous as well. People have also described a wide variety of catalytic activities with carbon dioxide and hydrogen catalyzed at hydrothermal vent environments by metals, such as the formation of small aldehydes and ketones (short-chain/branched carbon molecules with double bonds incorporating an oxygen atom) which can then go on to participate in other reactions with ammonia and hydrogen plausibly leading to amino acids. Another simple abiotic reaction is the formation of hydroxlamine (H2N-OH) which can feed into the synthesis of the simple ring structures of nitogenous bases (the components, plus five-carbon sugars, of the A,U,C,G's of RNA). See: Unified prebiotically plausible synthesis of pyrimidine and purine RNA ribonucleotides (2019) https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.aax2747 https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.aax2747 Abiotic synthesis of amino acids in the recesses of the oceanic lithosphere (2018) https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-018-0684-z https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-018-0684-z Both those articles are on sci-hub.se for those interested. One interesting speculation is that RNA and protein developed more or less simultaneously, and that short protein chains were affiliated with short RNA chains from the very beginning. This could plausibly result in a proto-ribosomal entity capable of self-replication using the abiotic pool of nucleosides and and amino acids as raw material. This idea has been around for ~20 years, here's something recent on it: A prebiotically plausible scenario of an RNA–peptide world (May 2022) https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-022-04676-3 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-022-04676-3 These kinds of reactions would seem to be quite plausible on other worlds with a liquid ocean. Also, they had millions of years to develop, meaning low-probability events aren't ruled out. Life is probably widespread in our universe.
- Metacelsus 4y ago>This polyribonucleic acid averages 100–300 nucleotides in length, with a substantial fraction of 3′,-5′-dinucleotide linkages Notably they don't distinguish linear vs. branched RNAs, it's the linear ones which are likely to be more interesting for the development of life.
- Traubenfuchs 4y agoIsn‘t RNA on its own useless? Doesn‘t it need the cells molecular machines to execute it? This seems to be the computer equivalent to: Cosmic rays formed a hello world program on this memory chip in my drawer.
- flobosg 4y agoRNA molecules can act as catalysts. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ribozyme https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ribozyme
- nradov 4y agoFor those interested in the chemical origins of life, the Lex Fridman podcast has a fascinating interview with University of Glasgow chemist Dr. Lee Cronin who has done some of the fundamental research in this field. It's long but worth a listen. https://lexfridman.com/lee-cronin/ https://lexfridman.com/lee-cronin/
- dukeofdoom 4y agoSo is the spike protein shedding real. I've learned in school that viruses directly exchange genetic information with each other. The possibility of wild RNA coming from the environment would be something new.