In a study published in the chemistry journal Angewandte Chemie, they demonstrated that a simple compound called diamidophosphate (DAP), which was plausibly present on Earth before life arose, could have chemically knitted together tiny DNA building blocks called deoxynucleosides into strands of primordial DNA.
The finding is the latest in a series of discoveries, over the past several years, pointing to the possibility that DNA and its close chemical cousin RNA arose together as products of similar chemical reactions, and that the first self-replicating molecules -- the first life forms on Earth -- were mixes of the two.
The discovery may also lead to new practical applications in chemistry and biology, but its main significance is that it addresses the age-old question of how life on Earth first arose. In particular, it paves the way for more extensive studies of how self-replicating DNA-RNA mixes could have evolved and spread on the primordial Earth and ultimately seeded the more mature biology of modern organisms.
"This finding is an important step toward the development of a detailed chemical model of how the first life forms originated on Earth," says study senior author Ramanarayanan Krishnamurthy, PhD, associate professor of chemistry at Scripps Research.
The finding also nudges the field of origin-of-life chemistry away from the hypothesis that has dominated it in recent decades: The "RNA World" hypothesis posits that the first replicators were RNA-based, and that DNA arose only later as a product of RNA life forms.
Journal Reference:
Ramanarayanan Krishnamurthy, Eddy I. Jiménez, Clémentine Gibard. Prebiotic Phosphorylation and Concomitant Oligomerization of Deoxynucleosides to form DNA, Angewandte Chemie International Edition (DOI: 10.1002/anie.202015910)
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 29 2020, @05:24AM (1 child)
posty
(Score: -1, Offtopic) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 29 2020, @06:24AM
\/\/OR/\/\
(Score: 5, Interesting) by fakefuck39 on Tuesday December 29 2020, @05:29AM (2 children)
full stop. what? now, i didn't read the article. but i did skim the first paragraph of the summary. so here's the deal why the article is bs.
dna doesn't replicate itself, nor can it build proteins. there is a very complex mitosis process (pmat, like near the toilet) which requires dna to make something. dna just stores information - it doesn't do anything. every step in protein synthesis and replication involves rna. if a strand of dna were to magically form, and randomly i'm sure it did - nothing would happen to it without a basic cell mechanism in place first. for which you'd need there to already be life. which, even with dna involved, is only made from rna.
there is no self-replicating dna just like there isn't a self-copying flash drive. without the reader and the little computer it's plugged into. but what you can get is random light hitting some metal on a disk, giving you some random data.
(Score: 5, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 29 2020, @06:01AM (1 child)
The article most certainly is not saying that DNA formed prior to RNA and was self-replicating. Even the title says otherwise. The article is saying that RNA and DNA likely formed at the same time on the primordial Earth. This is in contrast with the prior belief that the earliest self-replicating structures were purely RNA-based and that DNA developed later. There are RNA enzymes that can aid in the self-replication of RNA strands [newscientist.com]. Although such self-replicating RNA isn't currently found in nature, it appears possible that self-replicating RNA could spontaneously form. The article is providing an alternative explanation for what the first proto-cells could have been like, suggesting they might have contained both DNA and RNA instead of just being RNA-based.
Run along now. Go play with your pal creimer. You obviously aren't interested in discussing the topic when your post is so misinformed.
(Score: 0, Troll) by fakefuck39 on Tuesday December 29 2020, @12:41PM
me: dna can't give risr to life, first life had to be rna based only. the part that's first 'life' had nothing to do with random formed dna for first life.
title: life arose frop both rna and dna
you: i'm autistic and take too much ritalin daily and gonna keep focusing on some fat slashdot spammer for years and years
keep going methboy. you're very entertaining
(Score: -1, Offtopic) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 29 2020, @06:15AM (24 children)
Life is defined by cycling redox reactions, not genetic material. Viruses aren't alive, they are just little trojan horses of genetic material.
(Score: 2, Touché) by fakefuck39 on Tuesday December 29 2020, @12:47PM (23 children)
life != lifeform. star trek tng tells us that from the nanite episode. a dead person is a lifeform.
wiki:
Viruses are considered by some biologists to be a life form, because they carry genetic material, reproduce, and evolve through natural selection, although they lack the key characteristics, such as cell structure, that are generally considered necessary criteria for life.
but you're probably right and everyone else wrong. you should go correct the wiki entry for virus. those people will have a civil discussion about it with you, instead of calling you a retard who thinks he knows more than he does.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 29 2020, @01:46PM (22 children)
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entropy_and_life#Negative_entropy [wikipedia.org]
(Score: 1, Troll) by fakefuck39 on Tuesday December 29 2020, @02:22PM (21 children)
you should read that link. he is talking about dna with a complete blueprint for a functional cell. not a random short useless fragment created by random chance of shit bumping into each other. a random rock on the street cannot be compared to a house with furniture and a shower, just because both are composed of rock.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 29 2020, @04:17PM (20 children)
The point at the link is that life is characterized by "negative entropy", ie increasing the local amount of order. DNA, or whatever stores information, is incidental to this.
In principle you can have an immortal lifeform without any "genetic code", it would be a system that indefinitely performs a self-regulating cycle of chemical reactions to concentrate some molecules as others are degraded or diffuse away. A genetic code of some kind makes this easier, but is neither sufficient nor necessary for life.
Read more on the page to see the first life on earth was possibly UV-reactive pigments floating in water.
(Score: 2) by fakefuck39 on Tuesday December 29 2020, @04:29PM (19 children)
i have no idea how you got from that paragraph you quoted to "first life was UV-reactive pigments floating in water." that's not life, nor is it a lifeform. a virus is a lifeform, albeit probably not life. a dead dried up rat is a lifeform but not life. what you're saying is random nucleic acids and fragments that absorb UV light and can be reactive is life. it's not. nor a lifeform. nor does the article say that. the difference is a house of bricks is a house. a brick is not a house.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 29 2020, @05:05PM (18 children)
You can have a house without bricks just like life without genetics. But you can't have a house that doesn't perform the essential function of a house, which is to provide shelter. On the other hand anything that can be used to provide shelter can be considered a house (a cave, etc), same with life and negative entropy.
(Score: 2) by fakefuck39 on Tuesday December 29 2020, @05:49PM (17 children)
negative entropy is not life. and nowhere does the paper say that. it says negative entropy is associated with life. as in - in the more towards life, the less entropy. you're completely twisting that to say negative entropy means there's life. there's negative entropy in anything controlled. my remote control is not alive. a high fever does not cause the flu. the flu causes the fever. and many other things. if you have a fever, it does not mean you're getting the flu.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 30 2020, @12:04AM (16 children)
If you leave the remote sitting out it will slowly collect dust/grime and oxidize and in general break down. That isnt a system with negative entropy, so is thus not alive.
(Score: 2) by fakefuck39 on Wednesday December 30 2020, @01:18AM (15 children)
correct. you know what is a system with negative entropy? the system that made the remote. which by your definition is apparently alive. or is it the tv factory that's alive then?
tell me, do you talk to your tv often? does it respond personally to you? there are pills for that.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 30 2020, @02:04AM (1 child)
The factory would fall into a state of disrepair if not for the humans that run it. It is also not alive.
(Score: 3, Funny) by fakefuck39 on Wednesday December 30 2020, @02:14AM
ok, so the tv is alive then, since it was created by the negative entropy system (the factory). you never answered if the tv replies when you your conversations with it.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 30 2020, @02:13AM (12 children)
> Ignoring the entropy producing function of life is, in fact, the basis of the tautology in Darwin's theory of evolution through natural selection. As Boltzmann hinted 150 years ago, the vital force of life and evolution is derived from photon dissipation, i.e. through entropy production. Greater numbers of RNA/DNA in the Archean absorbed more sunlight and catalyzed the early Earth water cycle, besides driving ocean and wind currents. Reproduction and evolution were thus synonymous with increases in the entropy production of the coupled biotic and abiotic biosphere. Naturally selected mutations of the RNA/DNA-protein complexes, and later that of complex animals and ecosystems, wouldbethose allowing for ever greater increases in absorption of high energy photons and greater efficiency at converting these into heat.
(Score: 2) by fakefuck39 on Wednesday December 30 2020, @02:23AM (11 children)
you can paste that as many times as you want, but what would help would be you reading it, since you think it says if there is negative entropy it creates a lifeform. or did you forget what you originally replied to, because of adhd? i said random dna fragments didn't create a lifeform because dna can't replicate on its own, and complex mechanism to replicate dna is too complex to form randomly. kinda how you can't create a tv randomly, despite all the randomness in the world and the billions of years.
let me illustrate on the chicken and the egg. the egg came first. let's say there's a pre-chicken, one mutation away from being a chicken. it's a grown bird, it's already got a species. a mutation happens in the egg, now we have a chicken, unlike its parent.
same with dna. to replicate dna, you need a complex mechanism. which cannot be created by dna, since dna doesn't do anything on its own besides store information. that mechanism is created by rna. and that mechanism is a lifeform, like a virus.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 30 2020, @02:38AM (9 children)
> i said random dna fragments didn't create a lifeform because dna can't replicate on its own, and complex mechanism to replicate dna is too complex to form randomly.
It can though. It just requires the raw materials, UV light to provide the activation energy for chain elongation, and cycling temperatures near the denaturation theshold. Exactly like proposed to be found in the early Earth oceans.
The early earth was basically a giant PCR machine without the polymerase. No enzymes necessary.
(Score: 2) by fakefuck39 on Wednesday December 30 2020, @02:57AM (8 children)
so a fully built working tv will randomly appear in space given enough time. i gotcha. so now you finally understand my point. it doesn't just require raw materials and a few other small things. it requires literally a complex synchronized little factory to replicate DNA. What you're saying is if we took all the screws, some iron ore, some crude oil, put it in a big big box and shook it for a billion years, it'll at some point click into a tv factory and make a working tv. and given more time, random radiation from the sun will have the right frequencies in the right order that that tv, power wire hit by a random xray to make current, will show you a video of trump claiming election fraud.
this is the part I disagree with. because I can't imagine how long a billion years is, but I can imagine it would take literally almost infinity time for that to happen. rna randomly assembling into some shit by bumping into random soup compounds? we can observe that in a lab beaker within a few weeks. so which is likely then? this dna-rna thing, or, you know, the obvious easy thing that happens fast and all the time.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 30 2020, @03:12AM (7 children)
> Oligonucleotides with a defined sequence can be copied faithfully in the absence of enzymes.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1074552197902453 [sciencedirect.com]
(Score: 2) by fakefuck39 on Wednesday December 30 2020, @05:33AM (6 children)
I don't know why you're fixated on the enzymes. I make zero mention of enzymes. I make mention of a complex process to copy the dna of a life form. your link shows a short sequence can be copied. short like 5 or 20 NTs. a single gene is like 10k-100k. if you try to copy that with your UV light method, you destroy the DNA. hence it only works on super short sequences, so not a life form. not a single gene of a life form. not 1% of one gene of a lifeform.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 30 2020, @12:28PM (5 children)
What do you need all that complexity for? It is just for ultimately extracting energy from low energy visible light instead of the perfect energy UVC light. You don't need complexity when all the key molecules are UVC pigments that can pull a photon out of the air for any reaction.
In fact simple life forms probably make up dark matter. Nearly half the universe is behaving negentropically:
> It may be that in regions of the cosmos, dissipative self-organization of material under stellar photon fluxes has evolved to the point where the emitted spectrum is so far towards the infrared such that the emission lines have become many and too weak to be detectable. It may thus be possible that some of this dissipative structured material is contributing to the baryonic dark matter. Dark matter has been determined to make up some 27% of the mass-energy density of the universe and baryonic dark matter makes up approximately 10% of this dark matter density if the universe is at the critical density for closure, and if the standard model for big bang nucleosynthesis is correct. Since the known baryonic matter makes up less than 5% of the mass-energy density [89], the amount of material structuring dissipatively into the type of baryonic dark matter suggested here could exceed 50% of all observable matter in the universe. Other explanations for the invisible baryonic dark matter such as supermassive black holes or MACHOS have difficulty accounting for all of the missing mass.
https://arxiv.org/abs/1608.08847 [arxiv.org]
(Score: 2) by fakefuck39 on Wednesday December 30 2020, @02:11PM (4 children)
you need it to replicate a full dna strand and not destroy it. as your own claim states. because the method you note only works on super short fragments and not on long ones.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 30 2020, @03:16PM (3 children)
You dont need long ones to have life. Currently on Earth's surface you do since the UVC is all absorbed by ozone in the atmosphere, but not in general.
(Score: 2) by fakefuck39 on Wednesday December 30 2020, @03:23PM (2 children)
yes, yes you do need long ones to have life and a life form. 1 Gene is 10,000 long. Even 1 Gene is not enough for a lifeform. You claim some strand that's 25 long can be life. This tells me you don't know what DNA is or how it works. It's like saying a spec of sand can be a house. You're simply wrong.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 30 2020, @04:18PM (1 child)
Well your definition of life seems to be something with long dna strands, there is no arguing with circular logic.
(Score: 2) by fakefuck39 on Wednesday December 30 2020, @04:25PM
lol, that's not my definition. that's the definition. Life is not something that can be coded in .001% of 1 gene. That's not circular logic, that's just logic.
But there's not explaining this to someone who failed 8th grade biology, so I'll leave it at that, and won't bother reading your reply. Every time I play chess with a pigeon, he knocks over all the pieces, shits on the board, then struts around proudly like he's one. I just hit him with a stick and laugh. bbye now.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 30 2020, @02:50AM
> We have conjectured [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13] that the early synthesis, complexation, proliferation and evolution of the fundamental molecules of life (those common to all three domains; bacteria, eukarya, and archea) were driven by the dissipation of the long-wavelength (220–290 nm) part of the UVC solar photon spectrum prevailing for at least 1,000 million years at Earth's surface throughout the Archean [14, 15]. Photons from within this region of the solar spectrum have enough free energy to reconfigure covalent bonds of carbon based organic molecules, but not enough energy to disassociate these. From this perspective, molecular synthesis can be understood as microscopic dissipative structuring of pigments [6, 9, 13] and proliferation can be understood as autocatalytic photochemical replication of these [5], both driven by the dissipation of the Archean solar long-wavelength UVC photon flux; a process still relevant today for organic pigment synthesis and proliferation, albeit at visible wavelengths of lower photon energy, thus requiring routes of much greater biochemical complexity [6, 7, 8].
> Indeed, many of the fundamental molecules of life including nucleotides, amino acids, enzymes, vitamins, cofactors, stacked protoporphyrins, and conjugated fatty acids, all absorb and dissipate photons strongly within the 220–290 nm long wavelength UVC region [10], precisely that wavelength region where Sagan [14] and later Cnossen et al. [15] established the probable existence of an Archean atmospheric window.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S240584401831853X [sciencedirect.com]
(Score: -1, Offtopic) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 29 2020, @07:29AM
TPTB love to dine upon the flesh of the middle/lower classes. It's mixed in most food but it has some type of scrambler where you cannot detect it being a simple human being.
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 29 2020, @07:45AM
DNA-RNA mix? Is that like when you have sex with your cousin, because if so I could believe that.