Re: OT: Life from a drop of rain, New research suggests rainwater helped form the first protocell walls

On 22/08/2024 23:40, john larkin wrote:

On Thu, 22 Aug 2024 04:33:34 GMT, Jan Panteltje <alien@comet.invalid>
wrote:
 

Life from a drop of rain: New research suggests rainwater helped form the first protocell walls
A Nobel-winning biologist, two engineering schools, and a vial of Houston rainwater
cast new light on the origin of life on Earth
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2024/08/240821150020.htm
Date:
August 21, 2024
Source:
University of Chicago
Summary:
New research shows that rainwater could have helped create a meshy wall around protocells 3.8 billion years ago, a critical step in the transition from tiny beads of RNA to every bacterium, plant, animal, and human that ever lived.
>
There you go, simplicity!

 It's easy to form a blob with some goo inside. Like mayonaise.

One conjecture is that it takes a planet with a decent sized moon so that tide range is variable to have rock pools that concentrate the chemistry to a point where it works. We will know better once Mars or Europa has been properly explored. Finding life independently evolved somewhere else would go a long way to answering these questions.

 The hard part is the DNA and all its tousands of supporting
structures.

That is why self replicating autocatalytic peptides and RNA probably came first. They are much less stable and mutate faster. But RNA is good enough that plenty of viruses and viroids (plant pathogens) still use it today. They are the last remnants of earlier pre-DNA life on Earth.
DNA with its double helix preserves information much more reliably in complex organisms, but that came much later when cells started to have a nucleus and organelles inside. Primitive life had neither just a single chromosome (and bacteria today are descendents of those archaea).
--
Martin Brown