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From: Bill Sloman <bill.sloman@ieee.org>
Newsgroups: sci.electronics.design
Subject: Re: OT: Life from a drop of rain, New research suggests rainwater
 helped form the first protocell walls
Date: Sat, 24 Aug 2024 16:55:15 +1000
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On 24/08/2024 4:03 am, john larkin wrote:
> On Fri, 23 Aug 2024 10:59:17 +0100, Martin Brown
> <'''newspam'''@nonad.co.uk> wrote:
> 
>> 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.
>>
> 
> Or they are parasites that evolved after DNA life.

 From what?

>> 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 descendants of those archaea).
> 
> Proponents of RNA World should design an RNA based reproducing,
> evolving life form. 

They don't have to. Covid-19 is a perfectly adequate example. It does 
depend on us for reproduction, but you failed to exclude that mode of 
reproduction.

You probably want a free-living RNA-based life-form that can get its 
energy and its and its constituents from a non-living environment, which 
is a much bigger ask, in part because we don't know all that much about 
the environment prevailing before life had got its first toe-hold.

-- 
Bill Sloman, Sydney