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Register a new userEvolutionary advantage of directional symmetry breaking in self-replicating polymers
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Added by
Hemachander Subramanian
Publication date
2017
fields
Biology
and research's language is
English
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Due to the asymmetric nature of the nucleotides, the extant informational biomolecule, DNA, is constrained to replicate unidirectionally on a template. As a product of molecular evolution that sought to maximize replicative potential, DNAs unidirectional replication poses a mystery since symmetric bidirectional self-replicators obviously would replicate faster than unidirectional self-replicators and hence would have been evolutionarily more successful. Here we carefully examine the physico-chemical requirements for evolutionarily successful primordial self-replicators and theoretically show that at low monomer concentrations that possibly prevailed in the primordial oceans, asymmetric unidirectional self-replicators would have an evolutionary advantage over bidirectional self-replicators. The competing requirements of low and high kinetic barriers for formation and long lifetime of inter-strand bonds respectively are simultaneously satisfied through asymmetric kinetic influence of inter-strand bonds, resulting in evolutionarily successful unidirectional self-replicators.
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The macromolecules that encode and translate information in living systems, DNA and RNA, exhibit distinctive structural asymmetries, including homochirality or mirror image asymmetry and $3 - 5$ directionality, that are invariant across all life forms. The evolutionary advantages of these broken symmetries remain unknown. Here we utilize a very simple model of hypothetical self-replicating polymers to show that asymmetric autocatalytic polymers are more successful in self-replication compared to their symmetric counterparts in the Darwinian competition for space and common substrates. This broken-symmetry property, called asymmetric cooperativity, arises with the maximization of a replication potential, where the catalytic influence of inter-strand bonds on their left and right neighbors is unequal. Asymmetric cooperativity also leads to tentative, qualitative and simple evolution-based explanations for a number of other properties of DNA that include four nucleotide alphabet, three nucleotide codons, circular genomes, helicity, anti-parallel double-strand orientation, heteromolecular base-pairing, asymmetric base compositions, and palindromic instability, apart from the structural asymmetries mentioned above. Our model results and tentative explanations are consistent with multiple lines of experimental evidence, which include evidence for the presence of asymmetric cooperativity in DNA.
Directed polymers on 1+1 dimensional lattices coupled to a heat bath at temperature $T$ are studied numerically for three ensembles of the site disorder. In particular correlations of the disorder as well as fractal patterning are considered. Configurations are directly sampled in perfect thermal equilibrium for very large system sizes with up to $N=L^2= 32768 times 32768 approx 10^{9}$ sites. The phase-space structure is studied via the distribution of overlaps and hierarchical clustering of configurations. One ensemble shows a simple behavior like a ferromagnet. The other two ensembles exhibit indications for complex behavior reminiscent of multiple replica-symmetry breaking. Also results for the ultrametricity of the phase space and the phase transition behavior of $P(q)$ when varying the temperature $T$ are studied. In total, the present model ensembles offer convenient numerical accesses to comprehensively studying complex behavior.
In this paper we explore the topological properties of self-replicating, 3-dimensional manifolds, which are modeled by idempotents in the (2+1)-cobordism category. We give a classification theorem for all such idempotents. Additionally, we characterize biologically interesting ways in which self-replicating 3-manifolds can embed in $mathbb{R}^3$.
The ambitious and ultimate research purpose in Systems Biology is the understanding and modelling of the cells system. Although a vast number of models have been developed in order to extract biological knowledge from complex systems composed of basic elements as proteins, genes and chemical compounds, a need remains for improving our understanding of dynamical features of the systems (i.e., temporal-dependence). In this article, we analyze the gene expression dynamics (i.e., how the genes expression fluctuates in time) by using a new constructive approach. This approach is based on only two fundamental ingredients: symmetry and the Markov property of dynamics. First, by using experimental data of human and yeast gene expression time series, we found a symmetry in short-time transition probability from time $t$ to time $t+1$. We call it self-similarity symmetry (i.e., surprisingly, the gene expression short-time fluctuations contain a repeating pattern of smaller and smaller parts that are like the whole, but different in size). Secondly, the Markov property of dynamics reflects that the short-time fluctuation governs the full-time behaviour of the system. Here, we succeed in reconstructing naturally the global behavior of the observed distribution of gene expression (i.e., scaling-law) and the local behaviour of the power-law tail of this distribution, by using only these two ingredients: symmetry and the Markov property of dynamics. This approach may represent a step forward toward an integrated image of the basic elements of the whole cell.
We provide a non-equilibrium thermodynamic description of the life-cycle of a droplet based, chemically feasible, system of protocells. By coupling the protocells metabolic kinetics with its thermodynamics, we demonstrate how the system can be driven out of equilibrium to ensure protocell growth and replication. This coupling allows us to derive the equations of evolution and to rigorously demonstrate how growth and replication life-cycle can be understood as a non-equilibrium thermodynamic cycle. The process does not appeal to genetic information or inheritance, and is based only on non-equilibrium physics considerations. Our non-equilibrium thermodynamic description of simple, yet realistic, processes of protocell growth and replication, represents an advance in our physical understanding of a central biological phenomenon both in connection to the origin of life and for modern biology.
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