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

On 23/08/2024 8:40 am, 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.
 The hard part is the DNA and all its thousands of supporting
structures.

The general impression is that the first life was RNA-based, rather than DNA-based, and that it wasn't all that complicated. DNA and the "thousands of supporting structures" came later. We've got some 20,000 genes that code for specific proteins, and they get tweaked to produce about 100,000 different proteins. First life was presumably quite a lot simpler.
--
Bill Sloman, Sydney