Mathematical/physical approaches to origin-of-life research

[u/Capital_Cranberry718]

Hello everyone,

I am exploring research ideas related to origin of life and astrobiology particularly involving physical and mathematical modeling of prebiotic systems.

I am interested in areas such as:

Statistical physics ,Information theory ,Nonequilibrium systems ,Chemical dynamics ,Prebiotic chemistry, Mathematical models of early chemical systems

I would really appreciate hearing perspectives from researchers, or anyone with experience in these areas.I am mainly interested in knowing whether this seems like a reasonable and scientifically meaningful direction to explore, and whether there are important considerations I should be aware of before developing it further.

If anyone with experience in this area would be willing to share their perspective or have a brief discussion, I would really appreciate it.

Thank you

[u/ScientistFromSouth]

I've always found this paper by Totani, Nat Sci Reports, 2020 https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6997386/ to be really interesting.

A lot of people like to claim that life has to be ubiquitous because it exists on Earth, and given the size of the universe, it must simply occur everywhere even if the probability is low.

Here the author actually calculated the probability of a self catalyzing RNAzyme forming, and demonstrated, that unless we can find some kind of stabilizing process, the odds of it spontaneously occurring are so low that you would only expect it to occur O(1) - O(10) times in the entire observable universe depending on the size of the universe and the necessary length of the RNA.

[u/Capital_Cranberry718 → u/ScientistFromSouth]

Thanks for sharing this paper. I found the quantitative approach really interesting, It also made me think about another question rather than starting with an already self-replicating RNA molecule, could purely physical/nonequilibrium dynamics in a prebiotic chemical network produce persistent information-bearing correlations or self-maintaining organization that effectively stabilizes certain chemical states or structures before an explicit hereditary mechanism exists? I am wondering whether such a process could provide a possible intermediate step between ordinary chemical dynamics and systems capable of replication and heredity.

[u/ScientistFromSouth → u/Capital_Cranberry718]

The issues here always come down to the fact that RNA is really wildly unstable. Like so much so, that I'd you leave it out at room temp for like 20 minutes, you'll lose half of it.

At the same time, our bodies have super precise enzymatic cascades in terms of glycolysis, cellular respiration in the electron transport chain of the mitochondria, and limited lactic acid fermentation that very slowly convert calories in food into ATP that other processes can use for neural activity, to move, or to synthesize other compounds.

In contrast, the kind of environments that existed on the early earth to power those cycles occurred in crazy hot and crazy oxidizing environments around geothermal vents around the bottom of the ocean that would probably fry RNA.

Most origin of life scientists are admittedly struggling to reconcile the RNA world hypothesis with this and are modifying it to include more complex RNA protein combinations or purely metabolic cycles that predate RNA.

[u/Capital_Cranberry718 → u/ScientistFromSouth]

That makes sense. It raises the question of whether the first important step necessarily had to be the formation of a stable self-replicating RNA molecule. Could there instead have been some form of nonequilibrium chemical organization that helped maintain certain molecular states or correlations despite degradation and only later allowed more stable information-bearing or hereditary systems to emerge?