2017 March - 12 articles
This year marks the 48th anniversary of Francis Crick’s seminal work on the origin of the genetic code, in which he first proposed the “frozen accident” hypothesis to describe evolutionary selection against changes to the genetic code that cause deva...
Background: The transformation of the supported lipid bilayer (SLB) membrane by extracted cytosol from living resources, has recently drawn much attention. It enables us to address the question of whether the purified phospholipid SLB membrane, inclu...
The methods for establishing synthetic lifeforms with rewritten genetic codes comprising non-canonical amino acids (NCAA) in addition to canonical amino acids (CAA) include proteome-wide replacement of CAA, insertion through suppression of nonsense c...
Recent phylogenetic analyses are incorporating ultraconserved elements (UCEs) and highly conserved elements (HCEs). Models of evolution of the genome structure and HCEs initially faced considerable algorithmic challenges, which gave rise to (often un...
The tRNA identity elements for some amino acids are distinct between the bacterial and archaeal domains. Searching in recent genomic and metagenomic sequence data, we found some candidate phyla radiation (CPR) bacteria with archaeal tRNA identity for...
In this work, we determine the biological and mathematical properties that are sufficient and necessary to uniquely determine both the primeval RNY (purine-any base-pyrimidine) code and the standard genetic code (SGC). These properties are: the evolu...
Aminoacyl-tRNA synthetases (AARSs) have evolved “quality control” mechanisms which prevent tRNA aminoacylation with non-protein amino acids, such as homocysteine, homoserine, and ornithine, and thus their access to the Genetic Code. Of the ten AARSs...
At some point in early evolution, life became cellular. Assuming that this step was required for the origin of life, there would necessarily be a pre-existing source of amphihilic compounds capable of assembling into membranous compartments. It is po...
The editors of Life would like to express their sincere gratitude to the following reviewers for assessing manuscripts in 2016.
A basic problem in all postulated pathways of prebiotic chemistry is the low concentration which generally is expected for interesting reactants in fluid environments. Even though compounds, like nucleobases, sugars or peptides, principally may form...
An essential question in studies on the origins of life is how nucleic acids were first synthesized and then incorporated into compartments about 4 billion years ago. A recent discovery is that guided polymerization within organizing matrices could p...
Three novel strains of photosynthetic bacteria from the family Ectothiorhodospiraceae were isolated from soda lakes of the Great Basin Desert, USA by employing arsenite (As(III)) as the sole electron donor in the enrichment/isolation process. Strain...
