The hot spring hypothesis for the origin of life proposes that naturally occurring wet-dry cycles in small bodies of water could have driven condensation reactions on prebiotic Earth.
Editor’s note: with recent speculation about the potential habitability of other worlds and understanding the processes whereby other biospheres arise and evolve, thought needs to be given to developing sensor […]
The DNA foundation model Evo 2, first released in February 2025 as a preprint, is now published in the journal Nature. Trained on the DNA of over 100,000 species across […]
![Kinetic processes of the strand-based RNA reactor model [12,13,15] and their projection onto motif kinetics. We consider heteropolymer strands consisting of the two complementary nucleotides X and Y, which could represent RNA or DNA nucleotides. (a) Schematic of the reactions within the strand reactor, including hybridization, dehybridization, templated ligation, and cleavage of oligonucleotide strands. Strands that are not covalently linked are separated by small gaps; four-nucleotide motifs, including 3′ or 5′ ends, are highlighted in green. In templated ligation, a 3′- and a 5′-end motif build a six-nucleotide motif that contains three overlapping four-nucleotide motifs. (b) At the level of sequence motifs, the kinetics are based on motif production and motif breakage reactions. In four-nucleotide motifs, strand ends are marked with 3′ or 5′, respectively. Templated ligation generates longer strands containing additional motifs, thereby contributing to motif production, while strand cleavage leads to to motif breakage. Hybridization is not explicitly represented in the motif-level description; instead, it is implicitly incorporated into the rate constants for motif production and breakage by assuming a hybridization-dehybridization equilibrium and deducing the corresponding dissociation constants. -- Physical Review E](https://i0.wp.com/astrobiology.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/03/Sequence-Motif-Dynamics.png?resize=1200%2C720&ssl=1)
In RNA world scenarios, pools of RNA oligomers form strongly interacting, dynamic systems, which enable molecular evolution.
The origin of life is a complex scientific problem demanding interdisciplinary approaches. We propose a Linear Logic (LL)-based computational framework to formally evaluate the feasibility of early biochemical pathways across […]
Peary Land, northern-most Greenland, is a cold desert region whose soil microbiome remains underexplored. This is the first study to explore the halotolerant soil microbiome of this region with culture-dependent […]
Ribosomes are the components of cells that read RNA and build proteins. Without the ribosome, the chemistry of life would still be catalyzed by raw RNA. And yet the origin […]
The emergence of a chemical system capable of self-replication and evolution is a critical event in the origin of life.
Archaea, a domain of microorganisms found in diverse environments including the human microbiome, represent the closest known prokaryotic relatives of eukaryotes.
The origin of life embodies two fundamental questions: how and when did life begin? It is commonly conjectured that life began on Earth around 4 billion years ago.
