Abstract
A geneticist's view on the origin of life would focus on individual nucleic acid molecules rather than on their concentrations, on stochastics rather than on differential equations.
The ‘package model’ envisages primordial compartments that contain ensembles of primordial genes. These are replicated independently from each other. During package fission they are distributed to two daughter packages. Packages with a complete ensemble of genes can continue to propagate. However, mutations as well as the stochastic nature of replication and package fission occasionally cause arising packages to miss genes from the ensemble, thus resulting in the death of those packages.
A computer simulation, considering the complementarity of RNA as well as abortive termination of replication, yielded results that are similar to those of a preliminary simulation irrespective of these parameters: the results suggest that life could not have started with more than 3 genes, or else the primordial replicase would have to achieve at least a reduction of the replicational error rate by a factor of 13 and a reduction of undue chain termination by a factor of 10 to 25.
Article PDF
Similar content being viewed by others
Avoid common mistakes on your manuscript.
References
Bresch, C., Niesert, U., and Harnasch, D.: 1980,J. Theoret. Biol. 85 399.
Bridson, P. K. and Orgel, L. E.: 1980,J. Mol. Biol. 144 567.
Crick, F. H. C., Brenner, S., Klug, A., and Pieczenik, G.: 1976,Origins of Life 7 389.
Eigen, M.: 1971,Naturwissenschaften 58 465.
Eigen, M. and Schuster, P.: 1977,Naturwissenschaften 64 541.
Eigen, M. and Schuster, P.: 1978a,Naturwissenschaften 65 7.
Eigen, M. and Schuster, P.: 1978b,Naturwissenschaften 65 341.
Eigen, M. and Schuster, P.: 1982,J. Mol. Evol. 19 47.
Eigen, M., Gardiner, W. C., and Schuster, P.: 1980,J. Theoret. Biol. 85 406.
Hopfield, J. J.: 1978,Proc. Nat. Acad. Sci. USA 75 4334.
Inoue, T. and Orgel, L. E.: 1983,Science 219 859.
Niesert, U., Harnasch, D., and Bresch, C.: 1981,J. Mol. Evol. 17 348.
Niesert, U.: 1984, Dissertation, University Freiburg.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Niesert, U. How many genes to start with? A computer simulation about the origin of life. Origins Life Evol Biosphere 17, 155–169 (1987). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF01808243
Received:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF01808243