Package models and the information crisis of prebiotic evolution

DOI10.1016/J.JTBI.2008.02.012MaRDI QIDQ1794476zbMATH OpenOpenAlexWikidataFDO

Authors Daniel A. M. M. Silvestre, José F. Fontanari

Publication date 15 October 2018

Published in Journal of Theoretical Biology (Search for Journal in Brave)

Full work available at URL https://arxiv.org/abs/0710.3278

zbMATH Keywords

error thresholdgenetic diversitytemplate coexistence

Mathematics Subject Classification ID

Biochemistry, molecular biology (92C40) Genetics and epigenetics (92D10) Problems related to evolution (92D15)

Abstract: The coexistence between different types of templates has been the choice solution to the information crisis of prebiotic evolution, triggered by the finding that a single RNA-like template cannot carry enough information to code for any useful replicase. In principle, confining $d$ distinct templates of length $L$ in a package or protocell, whose survival depends on the coexistence of the templates it holds in, could resolve this crisis provided that $d$ is made sufficiently large. Here we review the prototypical package model of Niesert et al. 1981 which guarantees the greatest possible region of viability of the protocell population, and show that this model, and hence the entire package approach, does not resolve the information crisis. This is so because to secure survival the total information content of the protocell, $Ld$, must tend to a constant value that depends only on the spontaneous error rate per nucleotide of the template replication mechanism. As a result, an increase of $d$ must be followed by a decrease of $L$ to ensure the protocell viability, so that the net information gain is null.

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Cites work

• Branching processes in biology
• Coexistence and error propagation in pre-biotic vesicle models: a group selection approach
• Finite-size scaling of the error threshold transition in finite populations
• scientific article; zbMATH DE number 3249395 (Why is no real title available?)
• Lifetimes of small catalytic networks
• Nonequilibrium Phase Transitions in Lattice Models
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Cited in

(5)

• Selfishness versus functional cooperation in a stochastic protocell model
• The information capacity of hypercycles
• Coexistence and error propagation in pre-biotic vesicle models: a group selection approach
• Effect of migration in a diffusion model for template coexistence in protocells
• scientific article; zbMATH DE number 1404568 (Why is no real title available?)

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