Szostak Natalia, Synak Jaroslaw, Borowski Marcin, Wasik Szymon, Blazewicz Jacek
Institute of Computing Science, Poznan University of Technology, Poznan, Poland.
Institute of Bioorganic Chemistry, Polish Academy of Sciences, Poznan, Poland.
PLoS One. 2017 Jul 10;12(7):e0180827. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0180827. eCollection 2017.
Despite years of study, it is still not clear how life emerged from inanimate matter and evolved into the complex forms that we observe today. One of the most recognized hypotheses for the origins of life, the RNA World hypothesis, assumes that life was sparked by prebiotic replicating RNA chains. In this paper, we address the problems caused by the interplay between hypothetical prebiotic RNA replicases and RNA parasitic species. We consider the coexistence of parasite RNAs and RNA replicases as well as the impact of parasites on the further evolution of replicases. For these purposes, we used multi-agent modeling techniques that allow for realistic assumptions regarding the movement and spatial interactions of modeled species. The general model used in this study is based on work by Takeuchi and Hogeweg. Our results confirm that the coexistence of parasite RNAs and replicases is possible in a spatially extended system, even if we take into consideration more realistic assumptions than Takeuchi and Hogeweg. However, we also showed that the presence of trade-off that takes into the account an RNA folding process could still pose a serious obstacle to the evolution of replication. We conclude that this might be a cause for one of the greatest transitions in life that took place early in evolution-the separation of the function between DNA templates and protein enzymes, with a central role for RNA species.
尽管经过多年研究，但生命如何从无生命物质中诞生并演变成我们如今所观察到的复杂形式，仍不清楚。关于生命起源最广为人知的假说之一，即RNA世界假说，假定生命是由益生元RNA复制链引发的。在本文中，我们探讨了假设的益生元RNA复制酶与RNA寄生物种之间相互作用所引发的问题。我们考虑了寄生RNA与RNA复制酶的共存以及寄生虫对复制酶进一步进化的影响。为此，我们使用了多智能体建模技术，该技术允许对建模物种的移动和空间相互作用做出符合实际的假设。本研究中使用的通用模型基于竹内和霍格韦格的研究成果。我们的结果证实，即使我们考虑比竹内和霍格韦格更符合实际的假设，寄生RNA和复制酶在空间扩展系统中也可能共存。然而，我们还表明，考虑到RNA折叠过程的权衡的存在，仍可能对复制的进化构成严重障碍。我们得出结论，这可能是进化早期发生的生命中最大转变之一的原因——DNA模板和蛋白质酶之间功能的分离，RNA物种起核心作用。
