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Framing major prebiotic transitions as stages of protocell development: three challenges for origins-of-life research.

ABSTRACT: Conceiving the process of biogenesis as the evolutionary development of highly dynamic and integrated protocell populations provides the most appropriate framework to address the difficult problem of how prebiotic chemistry bridged the gap to full-fledged living organisms on the early Earth. In this contribution we briefly discuss the implications of taking dynamic, functionally integrated protocell systems (rather than complex reaction networks in bulk solution, sets of artificially evolvable replicating molecules, or even these same replicating molecules encapsulated in passive compartments) as the proper units of prebiotic evolution. We highlight, in particular, how the organisational features of those chemically active and reactive protocells, at different stages of the process, would strongly influence their corresponding evolutionary capacities. As a result of our analysis, we suggest three experimental challenges aimed at constructing protocell systems made of a diversity of functionally coupled components and, thereby, at characterizing more precisely the type of prebiotic evolutionary dynamics that such protocells could engage in.

SUBMITTER: Shirt-Ediss B

PROVIDER: S-EPMC5530630 | biostudies-other | 2017

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-other

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Project description:"Prebiotic soup" often features in discussions of origins of life research, both as a theoretical concept when discussing abiological pathways to modern biochemical building blocks and, more recently, as a feedstock in prebiotic chemistry experiments focused on discovering emergent, systems-level processes such as polymerization, encapsulation, and evolution. However, until now, little systematic analysis has gone into the design of well-justified prebiotic mixtures, which are needed to facilitate experimental replicability and comparison among researchers. This paper explores principles that should be considered in choosing chemical mixtures for prebiotic chemistry experiments by reviewing the natural environmental conditions that might have created such mixtures and then suggests reasonable guidelines for designing recipes. We discuss both "assembled" mixtures, which are made by mixing reagent grade chemicals, and "synthesized" mixtures, which are generated directly from diversity-generating primary prebiotic syntheses. We discuss different practical concerns including how to navigate the tremendous uncertainty in the chemistry of the early Earth and how to balance the desire for using prebiotically realistic mixtures with experimental tractability and replicability. Examples of two assembled mixtures, one based on materials likely delivered by carbonaceous meteorites and one based on spark discharge synthesis, are presented to illustrate these challenges. We explore alternative procedures for making synthesized mixtures using recursive chemical reaction systems whose outputs attempt to mimic atmospheric and geochemical synthesis. Other experimental conditions such as pH and ionic strength are also considered. We argue that developing a handful of standardized prebiotic recipes may facilitate coordination among researchers and enable the identification of the most promising mechanisms by which complex prebiotic mixtures were "tamed" during the origin of life to give rise to key living processes such as self-propagation, information processing, and adaptive evolution. We end by advocating for the development of a public prebiotic chemistry database containing experimental methods (including soup recipes), results, and analytical pipelines for analyzing complex prebiotic mixtures.

Project description:Highlights • Complex socio-technical challenges lack a method for their holistic framing.• Existent problem-framing methods are biased in favor of expert opinion.• CSFA provides a pattern-based ontological frame for complex problems.• System user data can be valuably mined to aid experts with problem-framing.• CSFA yields frames with improved coverage of plurality, abstraction, context and scope. Complex socio-technical challenges, often referred to as grand challenges or wicked problems, lack a robust method for their holistic framing. Current approaches to framing fall into two primary categories. On one hand, models grounded in reductionist perspectives tend to oversimplify the problems and thus fall short of capturing the true complexity that must be understood to make tangible progress. On the other, notable attempts to achieve holism are more effective at incorporating contextual nuance, but still lack systematicity to identify and drive effective inclusion of critical issues, and also tend to suffer from the inherent bias of select expert input. In this article, we report on an extension of holistic problem framing techniques called comprehensive success factor analysis (CSFA) that makes-sense of web-mined information reflective of both expert and general population perspectives as well as pattern-informed ontological knowledge organization structure, to yield ‘richer pictures’ of grand challenges. This method has been developed and refined over a seven-year period by application to a variety of distinct socio-technical challenges, and emphasizes that framing complex problems requires one to embrace multiple levels of abstraction, a plurality of perspectives, careful contextualization, and an overarching system view. The CSFA method results in ‘success factor trees’ that are more comprehensive than seen otherwise and present a holistic view of the essential factors that need to be considered when engaging in large scale socio-technical problems. The success factor trees provide common grounds for meaningful collaboration and discourse on grand challenges, facilitate more informed resource allocation decisions, and provide guidance for designing solutions through careful consideration of system factors that are not always apparent. The paper illustrates CSFA applied to the challenge of ‘food security for a nation in a low- to middle-income country context’ to ascertain the value of the approach and finds that it results in a robust view of the challenge that greatly exceeds perspectives arrived at in the literature using current framing methods, on dimensions of scope, levels of abstraction, plurality, and context detail. Graphical abstract Image, graphical abstract

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Framing major prebiotic transitions as stages of protocell development: three challenges for origins-of-life research.

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