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Reciprocal Nucleopeptides as the Ancestral Darwinian Self-Replicator

Banwell, Eleanor F.; Piette, Bernard M.A.G.; Taormina, Anne; Heddle, Jonathan G.

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Authors

Eleanor F. Banwell

Jonathan G. Heddle



Abstract

Even the simplest organisms are too complex to have spontaneously arisen fully-formed, yet precursors to first life must have emerged ab initio from their environment. A watershed event was the appearance of the first entity capable of evolution: the Initial Darwinian Ancestor. Here we suggest that nucleopeptide reciprocal replicators could have carried out this important role and contend that this is the simplest way to explain extant replication systems in a mathematically consistent way. We propose short nucleic- acid templates on which amino-acylated adapters assembled. Spatial localization drives peptide ligation from activated precursors to generate phosphodiester-bond-catalytic peptides. Comprising autocatalytic protein and nucleic acid sequences, this dynamical system links and unifies several previous hypotheses and provides a plausible model for the emergence of DNA and the operational code.

Citation

Banwell, E. F., Piette, B. M., Taormina, A., & Heddle, J. G. (2018). Reciprocal Nucleopeptides as the Ancestral Darwinian Self-Replicator. Molecular Biology and Evolution, 35(2), 404-416. https://doi.org/10.1093/molbev/msx292

Journal Article Type Article
Acceptance Date Nov 1, 2017
Online Publication Date Nov 8, 2017
Publication Date Feb 1, 2018
Deposit Date Nov 17, 2017
Publicly Available Date Mar 28, 2024
Journal Molecular Biology and Evolution
Print ISSN 0737-4038
Electronic ISSN 1537-1719
Publisher Oxford University Press
Peer Reviewed Peer Reviewed
Volume 35
Issue 2
Pages 404-416
DOI https://doi.org/10.1093/molbev/msx292

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Accepted Journal Article (884 Kb)
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Publisher Licence URL
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Copyright Statement
© The Author(s) 2017. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Society for Molecular Biology and Evolution.
This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted reuse, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.






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