Researchers inch closer to understanding the origin of life

In a review published in Nature on July 1, researchers provide an overview of origin of life research and highlight several key challenges in the field.

Three characteristics are necessary for de novo synthesis and the origin of life: metabolism, replication and compartmentalization. 

For life to begin, those three things must come together in an organized manner.

The review’s authors are Paul Adamski, Marcel Eleveld, Ankush Sood, Adam Kun, Andras Szilagyi, Tomas Czaran, Eors Szathmary and Sijbren Otto. They explain the three characteristics in this way:

“Although life is remarkably difficult to define, every living system exhibits metabolism, is able to reproduce and is separated from its environment. Metabolism involves the harvesting of energy, which is required because living systems are dissipative — they require energy input for their maintenance. Along with energy conversions, metabolism also involves conversions of matter to afford building blocks, which enable self- maintenance and reproduction. During reproduction, the system makes copies of itself with sufficient accuracy that the integrity of the species is maintained across generations. Nevertheless, reproduction is sufficiently error- prone so as to allow for Darwinian evolution through mutation and selection. Finally, compartmentalization keeps the components of a living system together and separate from the environment."

Research on self-replicating systems isn’t new, but scientists are making progress. After 30 years, the authors say there is an “increasingly clear path toward de novo life.”

But challenging questions and obstacles remain, particularly the integration of ideas with wet lab experiments to test them.

One challenge is the lack of methods to subject self-replicators to selective death. Currently most models for experiments that include death use indiscriminate processes, such as physical removal and dilution, neither of which is selective in and of itself.

“The search for open-ended evolution in a synthetic system is one of the few problems for which theory is unlikely to provide much guidance,” the authors write. “Nevertheless, we know that the laws of chemistry and physics facilitate open-ended evolution and it is encouraging that the first observations of chance inventions made by self-replicators have recently been made.”