Abstract
One of the most important problems of the origin of life, namely, the problem of the evolutionary primary carriers of selective functions in evolution that provided the required accuracy in the assembly of complex molecular structures at the prebiological stages of evolution, is discussed in this paper. In contrast to the widely abundant approaches to this problem that consider only RNA- and/or protein-like structures, we suggest that so-called fractal (crumpled) polymer globules could be the primary carriers of selective functions. The unusual structure and dynamics of fractal globules are described in this paper. It is demonstrated that although a fractal globule does not have the elements of the secondary structure of RNA and proteins, its dynamic properties are similar to those of biological molecular machines.
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Avetisov, V.A., Nechaev, S.K. Fractal polymer globules: A new insight on prebiological evolution. Geochem. Int. 52, 1252–1259 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1134/S0016702914130023
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1134/S0016702914130023