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Prebiotic chemistry

Replicating towards complexity

Nature Chemistry volume 7, pages 191–192 (2015)Cite this article

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Replication of long nucleic acid sequences was required for the evolution of biological complexity during the origin of life; however, short sequences are normally better replicators than long ones. A common physical environment now provides a simple mechanism to reverse this trend and enables long sequences to flourish.

Chemists are notoriously tolerant of long sequences of letters; however, long sequences of nucleotides had a harder time during the origin of life. In addition to being produced in low yields by prebiotic synthesis, long sequences also suffer from an important evolutionary disadvantage: it takes longer to replicate a long sequence than a short one. This intrinsic handicap in Darwinian fitness compounds over time, so, all else being equal, if a pool of nucleic acid sequences containing a range of lengths is left to replicate, short sequences will dominate and long ones will become extinct. The problem would have been particularly acute during the origin of life, when survival of the shortest would prevent the evolution of longer functional RNA sequences. Now, writing in this issue of Nature Chemistry, Braun and colleagues demonstrate1 that a simple physical environment, resembling an asymmetrically heated rock pore, neatly turns the tables, resulting in sharp selection of longer sequences.

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Figure 1: Survival of the longest.

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  1. Irene A. Chen is in the Department of Chemistry & Biochemistry, University of California, Santa Barbara, California 93106-9510, USA,

    Irene A. Chen

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  1. Irene A. Chen
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Correspondence to Irene A. Chen.

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Chen, I. Replicating towards complexity. Nature Chem 7, 191–192 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1038/nchem.2188

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