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Displaying entries 61 through 75 of 99 found.

Life's Corporeal Evolution Develops, Encodes and Organizes Itself: An Earthtwinian Genesis Synthesis

Demoulin, Catherine, et al. Demoulin, Catherine, et al. Oldest thylakoids in fossil cells directly evidence oxygenic photosynthesis. Nature. 625/529, 2024. Early Life Traces & Evolution, University of Liège astrobiologists post a further example of the analytic depths that our late Earthuman intelligence can now achieve as our global genius proceeds with a whole scale retrospect description. One is moved to ask whom is this emergent personsphere prodigy ready and able to carry out this project for which our late transitory phase seems made to do. Why does an apparent self-making cocreation need to achieve its own retrospect, recorded description.

Today oxygenic photosynthesis is unique to cyanobacteria and their plastid relatives within eukaryotes. The accumulation of O2 profoundly modified the redox chemistry of the Earth and the evolution of the biosphere, with complex life. Here we report the oldest direct evidence of thylakoid membranes in a parallel-to-contorted arrangement within the cylindrical microfossils Navifusa majensis from Australia. This discovery allows the identification of early oxygenic photosynthesizers, and the importance of examining the ultrastructure of fossil cells to decipher their palaeobiology and early evolution.

Thylakoids are membrane-bound compartments inside chloroplasts and cyanobacteria. They are the site of the light-dependent reactions of photosynthesis.

Goldford, Joshua, et al. Primitive purine biosynthesis connects ancient geochemistry to modern metabolism. Nature Ecology & Evolution. 8/4, 2024. Blue Marble Space Institute, Seattle, and Earth-Life Science Institute, Tokyo researchers including Harrison Smith sketch out a long feasible course from early precursors all the way present organisms.

An open question in the origin and evolution of life is whether a continuous track from geochemical precursors to the molecular biosphere can be reconstructed from modern biochemistry. Here we identify a pathway by simulating the evolution of a biospheric metabolism via biochemical reactions and models of primitive coenzymes.. This expansion trajectory leads to hypotheses about the tempo and mode pathway of metabolic enhanceent. An evident concordance between biological and geological analyses suggests a plausible evolutionary history for the majority of core biochemistry. (Excerpt)

Harrison, Stuart, et al. Life as a Guide to Its Own Origins. Harrison, Stuart, et al. Life as a Guide to Its Own Origins. Annual Review. Volume 54, 2023. Centre for Life's Origins and Evolution, University College London biotheorists including Nick Lane at once add new nuances as to how early living systems might have spontaneously come into being, but still do so within a mechanical frame.

The origin of life entails a continuum from prebiotic chemistry to molecular machinery. Using Here we consider how selection could promote increased complexity before replicative genes. Far-from-equilibrium environments such as hydrothermal systems drive reactions between CO2 and H2 that self-organize into protocells and prefigure the universal core of metabolism. Patterns in the genetic code show that genes and proteins arose through direct biophysical interactions between amino acids and nucleotides in this protometabolic network. Random genetic sequences template nonrandom peptides, producing selectable function in growing protocells. (Excerpt)

López-Díaz, Amahury Jafet , et al. The Origin of Information Handling. arXiv:2404.04374. Binghamton University, New York theorists including Hiroki Sayama and Carlos Gershenson consider and finesse another algorithm-like component as life gets its well proscribed act altogether. In regard, core guidance is provided by Howard Pattee, Juan Perez-Mercader, Chiara Marletto and Matthew Egbert. Once again something and someone seems in gestation, as long foreseen.

A major challenge when describing the origin of life is to explain how instructional information systems emerge naturally from mere molecular dynamics. Based on recent experimental results showing that chemical computations does not require a biological basis, we elucidate the origin and evolution of information processes by automata, computation and storage and transmission. In contrast to theories that assume initial complex structures, our narrative starts from early interactive self-replicators. By way of describing these primordial transitions, our metaphor can be translated to other models to explore biological phenomena at multiple spatial and temporal scales. (Excerpt)

We can imagine our planet as a big parallel, quasi-universal Turing machine capable of simulating a huge variety of functions (programs). Of course, natural resources are finite, and this is a limitation for life to emerge. Under this perspective, the first organisms on the planet could be described as some kind of automata which were running in these primitive environments. As a result of the geophysical and geochemical constraints, which we could call the primeval ecosystem language, elementary bimolecular reactions emerged. These chemical reactions are capable of recognizing regular languages, a task that does not involve counting or memory. (1, 2)

Lyons, Timothy, et al. Co‐evolution of early Earth environments and microbial life. Nature Reviews Microbiology. May, 2024. Akin to many current studies herein, UC Riverside, University of Alberta, Dartmouth, MIT, and University of Washington researchers can now proceed, so it seems, to recover, quantify and fill in the entire continous course from the physical ecosmos to a prokaryote milieu as it forms a viable ecosphere.

Two records of Earth history evoke the ascent of life and its co-evolving ecosystems: the geobiological and geochemical traces preserved in rocks and the evolutionary histories within genomes. In this Review, we explore the history of microbial life on Earth and the degree to which it shaped, and was shaped by, transitions in the chemical properties of the oceans, continents and atmosphere. We examine the diversity and evolution of early metabolic processes, their couplings with biogeochemical cycles and links to the oxygenation of the early biosphere. We discuss the distinction between the beginnings of metabolisms and their subsequent proliferation and their capacity to shape surface environments on a planetary scale. (Excerpts)

Mauro, Ernesto, ed.. The First Steps of Life. Wiley Online, 2023. This edited, authoritative collection is published as an ebook edition. Typical chapters are The Emergence of Life-Nurturing Conditions in the Universe by Juan Vladilo, The Role of Formamide in Prebiotic Chemistry (Raffaele Saladino), A Praise of Imperfection: Emergence and Evolution of Metabolism (Juli Pereto), and Making Biochemistry-Free Life in a Test Tube by Juan Perez-Mercader (see review). Here again, a dozen diverse chapters convey and integrate strong evidence that a veritable proof an in fact confirm a revolutionary ecosmic procreation.

Origin of Life studies have a retrospective goal: understanding nature through the comprehension of its origins and its complexities. This book proposes both an overview of this large area and an in-depth look at the opinions and results obtained by some of the active contributors. The topics occur a bottom-up order from the habitability of the universe to a meaningful prebiotic chemistry, the problem of chirality, and on through the role of minerals in biogenesis, fertile environments, cellular vesicles, replicative codes, the structure of LUCA and on their way to the evolution of information and complexity. (EDM)

Ernesto Di Mauro is a Molecular Biology professor and vice-president of the Académie Européenne Interdisciplinaire des Sciences, France. His research focuses on structural codes for complex molecular interactions in DNA topology, RNA-polymerases and DNA-topoisomerases.

Moody, Edmund, et al. The nature of the last universal common ancestor and its impact on the early Earth system. Nature Ecology & Evolution.. July, 2024. Nineteen paleobiochemists in the UK, across Europe and onto Okinawa, including Tim Lenton and Nick Lane, post a thorough recognition to date, bolstered by the latest instrumental and computational techniques, of this long supposed ancient, rudimentary bacterial precursor.

The nature of the last universal common ancestor (LUCA) with regard to its age and Earth system impact has been the subject of debate across diverse disciplines. Here we infer that LUCA lived ~4.2 Ga ago through divergence time analysis of pre-LUCA gene duplicates, microbial fossils and isotope records. Our results suggest LUCA was a prokaryote-grade anaerobic acetogen was part of an established ecological system. The metabolism of LUCA would have provided a niche for other microbial community members and hydrogen recycling by atmospheric photo chemistry could have supported a modestly productive early ecosystem.

Rout, Saroj, et al. An Analysis of Nucleotide–Amyloid Interactions Reveals Selective Binding to Codon-Sized RNA.. J. Am. Chem. Soc.. 145/21915, 2023. This recent posting by fourteen ETH Zurich and Aachen University biochemists including Roland Riek contends that rather than a single prebiotic path, several companion, catalytic reactivities and replicators were merging altogether toward a long vivid traverse to our retrospective curiosity. Into these 2020s then, by virtue of ever stronger evidence like this, a sufficient veracity may have been reached so as to confirm a phenomenal presence of an ecosmic procreativity.

Interactions between RNA and proteins form the basis of many biological processes from transcription and translation to gene regulation, yet little is known about their ancient origins. We hypothesize that peptide amyloids played a role whose repetitive structure lends itself to building interfaces with other polymers. Here, we report that short RNA binds in a sequence-dependent manner to peptide amyloids. Sequence-specific RNA–peptide interactions of this kind may then provide a path to understand how genetic code replication came to be. (Excerpt)

Walton, Craig, et al. Cosmic dust fertilization of glacial prebiotic chemistry on early Earth. Nature Astronomy. 8/5, 2024. ETH Zürich, Cambridge University and Oxford University enter a novel proposal that a lack of vital biochemicals could have been made up by hitched rides across the dusty ISM so to reach and fertilize our Archean era surfaces.

Earth’s surface lacks many elements considered vital for prebiotic chemistry. In contrast, extraterrestrial rocky objects are rich in these ingredients, which may have been delivered to our planet. However, the way by which they were supplied remains unclear. Today, the flux of extraterrestrial matter to Earth is mainly fine-grained cosmic dust. Although rarely discussed in a prebiotic context, cosmic deposits are known to form by sedimentary processes. Here we combine constraints on this aspect with simulations of dusty accretions to show that localized sediments could well have accumulated in early Earth environments such as glacial cryoconite materials. (Excerpt)

However, although these mechanisms operate across different spatial scales and timescales, they are not mutually exclusive. Thermally processed deposits of exogenous organic matter may have degassed HCN into lake systems fed by glacial meltwater rich in P and S sourced from locally dissolving cosmic dust. Taken together with recent findings from geology, astronomy and prebiotic chemistry, our results provide sup port for the fertilization of prebiotic chemistry by cosmic dust on early Earth. Furthermore, cosmic dust is potentially a widespread and flexible planetary fertilizer, being accreted in quantities that may be assessed by observation9,65 to potentially habitable exoplanets. (7)

Kacar, Betul. Foundations for reconstructing early microbial life.. arXiv:2406.09354. A University of Wisconsin bacteriologist proposes that a better comprehension of how this primal prokaryotic stage originally managed to survive and thrive as a guide to our present climate stresses.

For more than 3.5 billion years, life had extreme environmental conditions which include shifts from oxygen-less to over-oxygenated atmospheres and cycling between hothouse Earth and glaciations. Meanwhile, the planet evolved from a long microbial stage to plants and animals. Many cellular attributes evolved which collectively define our biosphere and now concern our human fate. In regard, a new disciplinary synthesis is needed to learn how microbes survived an ever changing globe over deep time. This review describes an emerging area in microbiology and evolutionary synthetic biology so to reconstruct the earliest microbial innovations.

Puri, Devina and Kyle Allison. Escherichia coli self-organizes developmental rosettes. PNAS. 121/23, 2024. Emory University and Georgia Institute of Technology biomedical engineers are able to discern the further presence of these cellular metabolic patternings in a prokaryotic microbe. Akin to embryonic somitogenesis, living systems of every kind are being found to to arrange and array themselves by way of iconic similarities.

Rosettes are self-organizing, circular multicellular communities that initiate developmental processes like organogenesis and embryogenesis in complex organisms. Though common in eukaryotes, this multicellular behavior has not been reported in bacteria. In this study, we found that Escherichia coli forms rosettes by active sister-cell repositioning. We went on to show that proper rosette formation was required for morphogenesis of multicellular chains, rpoS gene expression, and hydrostatic clonal-chain biofilms. These findings establish self-organization of clonal rosettes by a prokaryote and have implications for evolutionary biology, synthetic biology, and medical microbiology. (Excerpt)

Bennett, Gordon, et al. Bennett, Gordon, et al. Endosymbioses Have Shaped the Evolution of Biological Diversity and Complexity Time and Time Again. Genome Biology and Evolution. 16/6, 2024. After decades of denial, it has now become the fashion to describe the actual presence of all manner of beneficial symbiotic unions. Here UC Merced biologists so proceed to embellish along with a notice of a vital contribution to life’s communal emergence.

Life on Earth comprises prokaryotes and a broad assemblage of endosymbioses. Here, we provide a current perspective on how these processes form novel phenotypes that allow them to transition between adaptive landscapes to access environmental resources. Such mutual relationships have shaped and reshaped life on Earth. Early on mitochondria and chloroplasts arose via endosymbioses which led to upscaling of cellular energetics, multicellularity, and terrestrial planetary greening. Endosymbionts often experience adaptive genome streamlining, while hosts engage in resource exchange and cellular integration. (Excerpt)

McFall-Ngai, Margaret. Symbiosis takes a front and center role in biology. PLoS Biology. April, 2024. A California Institute of Technology systems microbiologist (search) provides an upbeat overview survey of this long overdue open frontier whence we can learn about these myriad occasions across life’s vivacious relational multiplexity.

These are early days and we have barely scratched the surface of the vast diversity of symbiotic systems that drive the biosphere. The ecological niches filled by invertebrates and plants are so varied that many strategies for living in the microbial world remain to be discovered. To address these different systems with the highest possible rigor, strong collaborations between animal and plant biologists and the community of microbiologists will be essential, although this imperative will not be easy, as the fields have been in silos since the 19th century. Despite these cultural challenges, it is a new day for biology, with a vast frontier to explore. (3)

Richards, Thomas and Nancy Moran. Symbiosis: In search of a deeper understanding. PloS Biology. April, 2024. Oxford University and UT Texas integrative biologists introduce eight articles which are meant as a belated admission of nature’s pervasive reciprocal interrelations between all manner of cellular embodiments, metabolic processes and environmental viability. This obvious feature can no longer be ignored for it has a primary evolutionary and organismic significance. Papers include What choanoflagellates can teach us about symbiosis by Arielle Woznica, Linking cell biology and ecology to understand coral symbiosis evolution by Niels Dingemanse and Annika Guse, Modeling endosymbioses by Lucas Santana Souza, et al, and Fungal holobionts as blueprints for synthetic endosymbiotic systems by Laila Partida-Martínez. But they often seem begrudged, with constant referrals to “mechanistic” reasons, along with not one mention of Lynn Margulis (search)who studied and advocated symbiosis since 1970.

The mechanistic biology that underpins symbiotic outcomes is fascinating. It is also where this field’s most interesting future lies. How do complex multifaceted symbiotic interactions emerge? How is partner specificity enacted? How is stability maintained under strong evolutionary MORE imperative towards exploitation and, therefore, interaction collapse? This collection demonstrates how the field is shifting to a growing focus on symbiotic interactions. By combining mechanistic and genetic understanding with evolutionary analysis, we can gain a direct view of how symbioses emerge. Only when we have this view for a range of systems can we look for unifying themes, if they even exist. (Abstract)

Symbiosis across the tree of life. Symbiosis research has become a holistic and pervasive field with a mature theoretical basis. Extraordinary diversity in symbiotic relationships exists across the tree of life. The aim of this special collection is to showcase symbiotic relationships across the tree of life, exploring their evolutionary basis and underlying mechanisms.

Once we have a deeper understanding of microbial endosymbionts in fungi, we will be able to design symbiotic systems that synergize the capabilities of fungi, bacteria, and viruses. These synthetic fungal holobionts could help us improve our crops to face climate change; restore eroded or contaminated soils; produce high-valued chemicals, enzymes, and other biomolecules and biomaterials; and increase the recycling of organic matter and plastics. (Laila P-M)

Dunbar, Robin. Structural and Cognitive Mechanisms of Group Cohesion in Primates. Behavioral and Brain Sciences. Online April 30, 2024. The senior Oxford University evolutionary psychologist is well known for his primate to human social studies and Dunbar number scale. (search). This entry provides is his latest thorough explanations for their beneficial veracity

Group-living creates stresses that often lead to fragmentation and conflict. Here I refer to grooming networks and cognitive abilities in primates to show that living in large, stable assemblies involved structural solutions which led to ‘friendship’ linkages, bonding behaviours so that coalitions work effectively, and cognitive skills similar to social relationships in humans. The first ensures that individuals synchronise their activity cycles; the second allows issues to be defused; and the third can manage difficulties. In primates, these strategies appear at specific group sizes, suggesting that they break through ‘glass ceilings.’ This sequence maps onto the grades that underpin the fractal-like Social Brain Hypothesis known to optimize information conversant flow.

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