The prebiotic emergence of protocells is an important part of chemical origin of life. This study shows that cyclic-phospholipids formed from fatty acids and glycerol could have played a role by generating a heterogeneous library of vesicles with diverse morphologies and tolerance to a range of metal ions, temperature, and pH.
If I had a dollar for everytime I’ve read a similar story in the last thirty years…
This sounds just like what we covered in my freshman biology class 9 years ago. Phosphoipid-lined vesicles providing space for self replicating nucleic acids to go bonkers.
Am i missing something from this specific paper?
I think the difference is they actually made the protocells for real? Not sure.
You’d have two dollars. But it’s weird it happened twice, right?
That’s how funding for grants works!
So is the theory that life started as two separate self-perpetuating processes (membranes and nucleic acids) that eventually joined together?
