Nick Lanes on Sean Carroll's podcast

[BillTre]

TL;DR Summary

Nick Lanes is a primary proponent of a metabolisms first, alkaline hydrothermal vent approach to the origin of life. He has just published a book on how core metabolism could have preceded the origin of life. He has a new book on this stuff.

Here is one of Sean Carrol's podcasts. He talks with Nick Lane who is one of the most interesting (to me) people publishing on origin of life issues. He takes a strong metabolism first approach to the origin of life and also strongly favors alkaline hydrothermal vents as the site for where life emerged.
He has a new book out: Transformer: the deep chemistry of life and death.

 

[BillTre]

Here is another video I just found by Nick Lane.
This one is nice in that he is only talking about origin of life issues and goes into a lot of detail on how early biochemistry might have worked.

 

[pinball1970]

@BillTre

This was in phys.org last week

https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2300687120

I quick flick through the refs and all the usual suspects there including Russell, Lane, Oparin, Wächtershäuser.
There was a debate on YT regarding research on abiogenesis recently (interesting but not for pf )

 

[pinball1970]

This popped up Monday

https://phys.org/news/2023-08-scientists-outline-strategy-life.html

Bridging the gap between top down and bottom up approaches.

https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2210924120

 

[BillTre]

This popped up Monday

https://phys.org/news/2023-08-scientists-outline-strategy-life.html

Bridging the gap between top down and bottom up approaches.

https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2210924120

I just got around to reading the PNAS paper.
Very interesting.
Nice find @pinball1970!

 

[pinball1970]

Something on the origin of ATP synthase.

An article and paper.

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-023-42924-w

https://phys.org/news/2023-11-universal-common-ancestor.html

 

[pinball1970]

More on thermal vents, this time formation of long chain fatty acids in simulated thermal vents at Newcastle university.

Fatty acids can naturally form membrane like structures so could have been important in the first protocells.

Article.

https://phys.org/news/2024-01-uncovers-potential-life-ancient-hot.html

Nature ref.

https://www.nature.com/articles/s43247-023-01196-4

 

[pinball1970]

Recent work on the "RNA world" model

https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2321592121

From the abstract,

"This study demonstrates the critical importance of replication fidelity for maintaining heritable information in an RNA-based evolving system, such as is thought to have existed during the early history of life on Earth."

https://phys.org/news/2024-03-life-evidence-rna-world.html

from the article

"The study, published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), unveils an RNA enzyme that can make accurate copies of other functional RNA strands, while also allowing new variants of the molecule to emerge over time. These remarkable capabilities suggest the earliest forms of evolution may have occurred on a molecular scale in RNA."

 

[BillTre]

Wow, it took them a while to find one that would work.

I thought for some reason PNAS had gone open access. I guess that was wrong on that.
Hammerhead RNA's are between 50 and 150 nucleotides long, but a core of 15 invariant bases and 3 helical stems (not sequence invariant). Other parts would seem to be more variable.