Seelig Burckhard, Chen Irene A
Department of Biochemistry, Molecular Biology, and Biophysics, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, MN, USA.
BioTechnology Institute, University of Minnesota, St. Paul, MN, USA.
Nat Chem. 2025 Jan;17(1):11-19. doi: 10.1038/s41557-024-01698-4. Epub 2025 Jan 6.
Understanding the emergence of complex biochemical systems, such as protein translation, is a great challenge. Although synthetic approaches can provide insight into the potential early stages of life, they do not address the equally important question of why the complex systems of life would have evolved. In particular, the intricacies of the mechanisms governing the transfer of information from nucleic acid sequences to proteins make it difficult to imagine how coded protein synthesis could have emerged from a prebiotic soup. Here we discuss the use of intellectual frameworks in studying the emergence of life. We discuss how one such framework, namely the RNA world theory, has spurred research, and provide an overview of its limitations. We suggest that the emergence of coded protein synthesis could be broken into experimentally tractable problems by treating it as a molecular bricolage-a complex system integrating many different parts, each of which originally evolved for uses unrelated to its modern function-to promote a concrete understanding of its origin.
理解诸如蛋白质翻译等复杂生化系统的起源是一项巨大的挑战。尽管合成方法能够让我们深入了解生命可能的早期阶段，但它们并未解决一个同样重要的问题，即生命的复杂系统为何会进化。特别是，从核酸序列到蛋白质的信息传递机制错综复杂，这让人难以想象编码蛋白质合成是如何从原始有机汤中产生的。在此，我们讨论在研究生命起源中知识框架的运用。我们探讨了其中一个框架，即RNA世界理论是如何推动研究的，并概述了其局限性。我们认为，通过将编码蛋白质合成的起源视为一种分子拼搭——一个整合了许多不同部分的复杂系统，每个部分最初的进化用途都与其现代功能无关——从而将其分解为可通过实验处理的问题，有助于具体理解其起源。
