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From: Martin Brown <'''newspam'''@nonad.co.uk>
Newsgroups: sci.electronics.design
Subject: Re: OT: Life from a drop of rain, New research suggests rainwater
 helped form the first protocell walls
Date: Fri, 23 Aug 2024 10:59:17 +0100
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On 22/08/2024 23:40, john larkin wrote:
> On Thu, 22 Aug 2024 04:33:34 GMT, Jan Panteltje <alien@comet.invalid>
> wrote:
> 
>> Life from a drop of rain: New research suggests rainwater helped form the first protocell walls
>> A Nobel-winning biologist, two engineering schools, and a vial of Houston rainwater
>> cast new light on the origin of life on Earth
>> https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2024/08/240821150020.htm
>> Date:
>> August 21, 2024
>> Source:
>> University of Chicago
>> Summary:
>> New research shows that 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.
>>
>> There you go, simplicity!
> 
> It's easy to form a blob with some goo inside. Like mayonaise.

One conjecture is that it takes a planet with a decent sized moon so 
that tide range is variable to have rock pools that concentrate the 
chemistry to a point where it works. We will know better once Mars or 
Europa has been properly explored. Finding life independently evolved 
somewhere else would go a long way to answering these questions.
> 
> The hard part is the DNA and all its tousands of supporting
> structures.

That is why self replicating autocatalytic peptides and RNA probably 
came first. They are much less stable and mutate faster. But RNA is good 
enough that plenty of viruses and viroids (plant pathogens) still use it 
today. They are the last remnants of earlier pre-DNA life on Earth.

DNA with its double helix preserves information much more reliably in 
complex organisms, but that came much later when cells started to have a 
nucleus and organelles inside. Primitive life had neither just a single 
chromosome (and bacteria today are descendents of those archaea).

-- 
Martin Brown