Compositional diversity of minimal coacervates in a nucleic acid-peptide world
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The early co-evolution of RNA and peptides is at the core of the RNA-peptide world hypothesis. Recent studies suggest that nucleotides and amino acids could have formed and polymerised non-enzymatically under prebiotic conditions, generating short oligonucleotides and peptides capable of non-enzymatic RNA replication and peptide synthesis. However, whether the cooperation between nucleic acids and peptides stems from their co-localisation in primitive compartments is unclear. Here we demonstrate the early and likely inevitable emergence of primitive coacervates via liquid-liquid phase separation of prebiotic heterogeneous mixtures of short non-coded oligonucleotides and peptides. We show that peptide/nucleic acid coacervates are more prone to form than peptide/peptide coacervates, and that peptide/RNA coacervates are remarkably more stable than peptide/DNA coacervates. Atomistic simulations confirm that the more extended and less structured conformation of RNA over DNA enables more contact points with peptides. The more abundant interactions in peptide/RNA coacervates lead to enhanced salt and thermal stability, yet reduced fluidity compared to their DNA counterparts - which are in turn capable to fully preserve RNA secondary structure upon partitioning. Our findings suggest that peptide/oligonucleotide co-localisation via coacervation would have inevitably occurred at an early stage of a more holistic nucleic acid-peptide world scenario. Both RNA and DNA would have thus been required to ensure the emergence of coacervates with balanced stability and fluidity to host non-enzymatic RNA chemistry.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".