[Bioorganic Chemistry]. In the study of the origin of life, the polymerization of amino acids into peptides in water faces significant thermodynamic barriers, often referred to as the “water problem.”
Origin & Evolution of Life
Posted inOrigin & Evolution of Life
Do Himalayan-style Mountains Lie Under The Antarctic ice: Implication For The Gondwana Supermountains, The Rise Of Oxygen And The Cambrian Explosion?
[Earth and Planetary Science Letters] Analyses of detrital zircons from Antarctica show that its tectonics were dominated by Himalayan-style mountains, the roots of which now underlie the ice sheet.
Posted inOrigin & Evolution of Life
Tracing 700 Million Years Of Cell Evolution
[KAUST] Publishing in Nature Communications, a KAUST-led team has developed the AI tool Unify to help scientists compare similar cell types across distant species[1]. This comparison can help researchers assess […]
Posted inGenomics, Proteomics, Bioinformatics
The Variability Of Evolvability: Properties Of Dynamic Fitness Landscapes Determine How Phenotypic Variability Evolves
[PNAS] The magnitude and shape of phenotypic variation depends on properties of the genotype-to-phenotype (GP) map, which itself can evolve over time. The evolution of GP maps is particularly interesting […]
Posted inOrigin & Evolution of Life
Selection For Propagule Formation In Prebiotic Chemical Ecosystems
[biorxiv.org] Biological individuals on Earth today are cellular, but the simplest cells are too complex to have arisen spontaneously.
Posted inOrigin & Evolution of Life
The Abiotic Background: Challenges and Opportunities in the Search for Evidence of Life Beyond Earth
[Astrobiology (Journal) via PubMed]. The “Exploring the Abiotic Background for Life Detection“ workshop was convened between March 31, 2025, and April 3, 2025, at the Carnegie Institution for Science in […]
Posted inBiophysics
Balance Between Order and Disorder: Quantum-Epigenetic Pathways for the Emergence and Continuous Evolution of Life
[Acta Biotheoretica] The scientific restlessness surrounding the question of what life is (expressed in the provocations of Feynman and Schrödinger) guides this review article by integrating physics, chemistry, and biology […]
Posted inGenomics, Proteomics, Bioinformatics
Deep Shifts In Evolutionary Rate Trajectories Of Ancient Bacterial Genes
[biorxiv.org] Reconstruction of ancestral gene repertoires from extant genomes captures only the genes that survived; those lost from the record are invisible. Among the genes that did persist, selective pressures […]
Posted inGenomics, Proteomics, Bioinformatics
A Genomic Catalog Of Earth’s Bacterial And Archaeal Symbionts
[Nature Biotechnology] Microbial symbiosis drives the functional and phylogenomic diversification of life on Earth yet remains underexplored because of culturing challenges.
Posted inBiophysics
How A Deep-sea Protein Adapts To An Extreme Environment
[Kyushu University] Life in the deep sea is under immense pressure—literally. Such extreme conditions can disrupt the delicate structures of proteins essential to life. Yet somehow, the proteins in deep-sea […]