Laboratório de Biologia Teórica e de Sistemas, Instituto de Bioquímica Médica Leopoldo de Meis, Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.
Laboratório de Genética Evolutiva Paulo Leminski, Centro de Ciências Exatas e da Natureza, Universidade Federal da Paraíba, João Pessoa, Paraíba, Brazil; Network of Researchers on the Chemical Evolution of Life (NoRCEL), Leeds, LS7 3RB, UK.
Biosystems. 2021 Aug;206:104445. doi: 10.1016/j.biosystems.2021.104445. Epub 2021 May 24.
A powerful and concise concept of life is crucial for studies aiming to understand the characteristics that emerged from an inorganic world. Among biologists, the most accepted argument define life under a top-down strategy by looking into the shared characteristics observed in all cellular organisms. This is often made highlighting (i) autonomy and (ii) evolutionary capacity as fundamental characteristics observed in all cellular organisms. Along the present work, we assume the framework of code biology considering that biology started with the emergence of the first organic code by self-organization. We reinforces that the conceptual structure of life should be reallocated from the ontology class of Matter to its sister class of Process. Along the emergence and early evolution of biological systems, biological codes changed from open systems of "naked" molecules (at the progenote era), to close, encapsulated systems (at the organismic era). Living beings appeared at the very moment when nucleic acids with coding properties became encapsulated. This led to the origin of viruses and, then, to the origin of cells. In this context, we propose that the single character that makes a clear distinction between the abiotic and the biotic world is the capacity to process organic codes. Thus, life appears with the self-assembly of a genetic code and evolves by the emergence of other overlapping codes. Once life has been clearly conceptualized, we go further to conceptualize organisms, parents, lineages, and species in terms of code biology.
生命的一个强有力且简洁的概念对于旨在理解从无机世界中出现的特征的研究至关重要。在生物学家中，最被接受的观点是通过研究所有细胞生物中观察到的共同特征，采用自上而下的策略来定义生命。这通常通过强调（i）自主性和（ii）进化能力作为所有细胞生物的基本特征来实现。在本研究中，我们假设代码生物学的框架，认为生物学是从第一个通过自组织出现的有机代码开始的。我们强调，生命的概念结构应该从物质的本体论类重新分配到其姐妹类过程。随着生物系统的出现和早期进化，生物代码从“裸露”分子的开放系统（在前基因组时代）转变为封闭、封装的系统（在生物体时代）。当具有编码性质的核酸被封装时，生物就出现了。这导致了病毒的起源，然后是细胞的起源。在这种情况下，我们提出，将无生命世界和有生命世界区分开来的唯一特征是处理有机代码的能力。因此，生命随着遗传密码的自我组装而出现，并通过其他重叠代码的出现而进化。一旦生命被明确概念化，我们就会进一步根据代码生物学来概念化生物体、父母、谱系和物种。
