One of the major unanswered questions about the origin of life is how droplets of RNA floating around the primordial soup turned into the membrane-protected packets of life we call cells.
A new paper by engineers from the University of Chicago’s Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering (UChicago PME), the University of Houston’s Chemical Engineering Department, and biologists from the UChicago Chemistry Department, have proposed a solution.
In the paper, published today in Science Advances, UChicago PME postdoctoral researcher Aman Agrawal and his co-authors – including UChicago PME Dean Emeritus Matthew Tirrell and Nobel Prize-winning biologist Jack Szostak – show how 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.
“This is a distinctive and novel observation,” Tirrell said.
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