Compositional and functional diversity of minimal primitive coacervates in a nucleic acid-peptide world
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The RNA-peptide world hypothesis postulates the early co-evolution of RNA and peptides, leading to the emergence of non-enzymatic RNA replication and peptide synthesis. Although nucleotides and amino acids were shown to form and polymerise under prebiotic conditions, the origin of their synergy, ubiquitously preserved in the central dogma of modern biology, remains unclear. We propose that the cooperation between DNA, RNA and peptides might have stemmed from their co-localisation in early compartments. Here we show that heterogeneous mixtures of prebiotic oligonucleotides and peptides spontaneously assemble into primitive coacervates. Experimental and computational studies reveal that peptide/nucleic acid coacervates are more robust and form over a broader range of conditions than peptide/peptide analogues. Notably, RNA-based coacervates exhibit exceptional stability and, in the presence of DNA, minimal viscosity, facilitating the diffusion of reactive oligonucleotides and supporting prebiotic RNA chemistry. Our findings suggest that coacervation may have occurred in the early on the evolutionary timeline, fostering the emergence of a nucleic acid-peptide world. This study provides new insights into the prebiotic role of coacervates, reconsidering their significance in the origins of life and the emergence of primitive replication and translation systems.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| 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 | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
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 teacher head, 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".