Sleep Well

[Glenn]

"Life must have begun with a simple molecule that could reproduce itself – and now we think we know how to make one

4 BILLION years before present: the surface of a newly formed planet around a medium-sized star is beginning to cool down. It’s a violent place, bombarded by meteorites and riven by volcanic eruptions, with an atmosphere full of toxic gases. But almost as soon as water begins to form pools and oceans on its surface, something extraordinary happens. A molecule, or perhaps a set of molecules, capable of replicating itself arises.

This was the dawn of evolution. Once the first self-replicating entities appeared, natural selection kicked in, favouring any offspring with variations that made them better at replicating themselves. Soon the first simple cells appeared. The rest is prehistory.

Billions of years later, some of the descendants of those first cells evolved into organisms intelligent enough to wonder what their very earliest ancestor was like."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Abbv4s1j9PE

https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg21128251-300-first-life-the-search-for-the-first-replicator/

[RonO]

Glenn, did you read the article for comprehension or are you just
wallowing in denial. Describe what the article actually was about and
how that fits in with your IDiotic notions.

Ron Okimoto

[Glenn]

You're insane, Ron.

[RonO]

So you don't want to understand what you just posted, again. That has
to be getting old even for you. Projection of such insanity doesn't
change reality.

Ron Okimoto

[RonO]

On 10/29/2022 2:27 PM, Glenn wrote:

This article is about the RNA world hypothesis for the origin of life
and how it could have gotten started. It goes through the issues with
synthesis of the RNA molecules. One thing that probably wasn't a factor
back then was the stability of RNA. The article has the idea that RNA
would have been less stable than DNA, but my take from early molecular
biology was that it wasn't any more unstable than DNA. RNA can be
double stranded too so the oxidation reactions that work on single
stranded DNA and RNA might not have been that much of an issue. The big
reason that RNA is so unstable is the huge amount of RNAses in the
environment and how stable they are. You can boil RNAse and it can
refold and become active again. There is enough RNAse in a fingerprint
to degrade all the RNA you can isolate among the hundreds of samples
that you might process in a day, and it is difficult to purify RNA so
that it is RNAse free. We even have to go to extremes of trying to get
RNAse free water for the extractions. Dust particles and skin flakes
are enough to destroy a days work, so we freeze RNA at low temperatures
and try to use RNAse inhibitors to keep the RNA intact. These RNAses
are required today because degrading existing RNA is one of the major
jobs in any cell. A lot of it is made and a lot has to be degraged,
especially the parts like introns that are left over after the exons are
spliced together. The DMD gene might have a transcript of over a
million nucleotides, but all but 14,000 nucleotides make up the final
mRNA, and all the rest has to be degraded and recycled. This would not
have been an issue back before RNAse existed. The original RNA
replicator would have likely been able to do the reverse reaction and
degrade RNA, but RNAse would have had to evolve once there was enough
RNA floating around that needed to be degraded and recycled.

Ron Okimoto