Ontology highlight
ABSTRACT:
SUBMITTER: Levin SR
PROVIDER: S-EPMC5745566 | biostudies-literature | 2017 Dec
REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature
Levin Samuel R SR West Stuart A SA
Life (Basel, Switzerland) 20171205 4
Various steps in the RNA world required cooperation. Why did life's first inhabitants, from polymerases to synthetases, cooperate? We develop kin selection models of the RNA world to answer these questions. We develop a very simple model of RNA cooperation and then elaborate it to model three relevant issues in RNA biology: (1) whether cooperative RNAs receive the benefits of cooperation; (2) the scale of competition in RNA populations; and (3) explicit replicator diffusion and survival. We show ...[more]