Towards a General Definition of Life

Vitas, Marko; Dobovišek, Andrej

doi:10.1007/s11084-019-09578-5

Cited by 37 publications

(23 citation statements)

References 74 publications

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“…A third example is a more recent definition of life, "Life is a far from equilibrium self-maintaining chemical system capable of processing, transforming and accumulating information acquired from the environment". 10 In my opinion, this definition has three drawbacks: i) the term "self" should disappear because the quality of life does not provide self-sufficiency; ii) the thermodynamic component does not highlight how fundamental low entropy or high order is for any living being; iii) information can be acquired from "within" and not only from the environment. There are many more definitions of life but as R. Popa says "We may never agree on a definition of life, which will remain forever subject to a personal perspective".…”

Section: What Is Life?mentioning

confidence: 99%

What Is Life? Are Viruses Living Entities?

Gómez-Márquez¹

2020

Preprint

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What is life, what is the difference between something that is alive and something that is not, are viruses living beings, or what would life be like elsewhere in the universe, are questions that still do not have clear-cut answers fully accepted by the scientific community. Based on the fundamental attributes of all living things, I define life as a process that takes place in very ordered organic structures and is characterized by being automatic, interactive and evolutionary. I also define a living being as an organic, highly ordered, automatic, interacting and evolutionary system, and a robot as an ordered automatic and interacting system. Based on this definition and what we know about the biology of viruses, I maintain that they should be considered as living entities. Finally, I explain why if there were life elsewhere in the universe, it would be very similar to what we know on our planet.

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Section: What Is Life?mentioning

confidence: 99%

What Is Life? Are Viruses Living Entities?

Gómez-Márquez¹

2020

Preprint

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“…Genetic information is molecular memory recorded by triplet codon, but its origin has been investigated and debated for a long time (e.g., [1,2,3,4,5]. It is a miracle of nature that a set of genetic codes was able to produce tens of millions of different species on the earth.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

ATP-Hypothesis: A New Conceptual Framework for the Origins of Genetic Codes

Xie¹

2020

Preprint

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The origin of genetic codes is the key to reveal life’s origin on the earth as it is a prerequisite for the existence of life. More than half a century has passed since the discovery of genetic codes, while their origin is still one of the greatest mysteries. Are the origins of genetic codes really unknowable? Do they really require external design? Here, I present an ATP-hypothesis that explains how the genetic codes came into being with the coevolution of biochemical system. ATP has several properties that make it suitable as the initiator of the origin of genetic codes. First, ATP is the only energetic product of photosynthesis. Second, ATP is at the heart of the extant biochemical systems. Third, ATP serves as carriers of both energy and information. Fourth, ATP could energetically elongate chains of both polynucleotides and polypeptides, thus providing a bridge between them, and eventually mediating prebiotic biochemical transaction from energy to information. This hypothesis shows how primitive life emerged through a series of processes from energy to information mediated by ATP. Informatization (processes of creating and managing information) was inevitably coupled with structuralization (processes of organizing or incorporating into a cellular structure), making polynucleotides and polypeptides be cyclized into a system of reciprocal causation. The triplet codon might just be for stereo-chemical handing of amino acid through e.g. Watson–Crick pairing interactions. It is an evolutionary completion for genetic codes from RNA to DNA, only which, a reverse to the Central Dogma, marked the dawn of cellular life when Darwinian evolution began to operate. ATP-hypothesis shades lights on the origin of life, together with the formations of both photosynthesis and biochemical systems, which have been largely unknown so far.

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“…The genetic information is recorded in chemical memories (RNA or DNA) by means of triplets of nucleotides named codons, but its origin has been investigated and debated for a long time (e.g., [1,2,3,4,5]). It is a miracle of nature that a set of genetic codes was able to produce tens of millions of different species on Earth.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The ATP Hypothesis: A New Conceptual Framework for the Origin of the Genetic Code

Xie¹

2020

Preprint

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

The origin of the genetic code is the key to revealing the origin of life on Earth, as it is a prerequisite for the existence of life. More than half a century has passed since the discovery of the genetic code, but its origin is still one of the greatest mysteries. Is the origin of the genetic code truly unknowable? Does the code truly require external design? Here, a hypothesis is proposed, according to which ATP is at the origin of the genetic code by its coevolution with the pristine biochemical system. ATP has several properties that make it suitable as a plausible initiator of the genetic code. First, ATP is the only energetic product of photosynthesis. Second, ATP is at the heart of the extant biochemical systems. Third, ATP serves as a carrier of both energy and information. Fourth, ATP could energetically elongate chains of both polynucleotides and polypeptides, thus providing a bridge between these molecules and eventually mediating prebiotic biochemical innovation from energy transformation to informatization. This hypothesis shows how primitive life emerged through a series of processes from energy to information flow mediated by ATP. Informatization (processes for creating and managing information) was inevitably coupled with structuralization (processes for organizing or incorporating cellular structures), cyclizing polynucleotides and polypeptides into a feedback loop of reciprocal causation. The triplet codon might be only for stereochemical handling of amino acids through, e.g., Watson–Crick pairing interactions. It is only the evolutionary completion of the genetic code from RNA to DNA that, contrary to the central dogma, marked the dawn of cellular life, when Darwinian evolution began to operate. The ATP hypothesis sheds light on the origin of life, together with the formation of both photosynthetic and biochemical systems, which remains largely unknown thus far.

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Towards a General Definition of Life

Cited by 37 publications

References 74 publications

What Is Life? Are Viruses Living Entities?

What Is Life? Are Viruses Living Entities?

ATP-Hypothesis: A New Conceptual Framework for the Origins of Genetic Codes

The ATP Hypothesis: A New Conceptual Framework for the Origin of the Genetic Code

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