Qt45: A small polymerase ribozyme that can synthesize itself (opens in new tab)

I don't see any reason for the source molecules to come from space. We already know that nucleotides will spontaneously form and polymerize in conditions consistent with the early earth, and a meteorite origin just moves the source of those nucleotides elsewhere but doesn't answer how they formed.

If raw materials isn’t the bottle neck for life every where, then what might it further down the line between oceans full of nucleotides and life? The oceans themselves?

I wonder how much nucleotides present in asteroids in space survive the massive heating in the atmosphere and the crash though.

(these are not proteins, these are RNA sequences)

And it's likely that there are even smaller replicators but probably not much smaller. And there are likely more configurations among these 45 base-combinations that can self-replicate. It's also more likely that the first replicators were arrangements of multiple smaller molecules that can amplify themselves, and not just one large molecule.

But even this longer sequence is well within the realm of synthesis by pure chance. RNA molecules can grow base-by-base, so a random walk model should eventually produce it.

Actually, the search here is chemical -- you make a bunch of random small RNA sequences, then chemically replicate those that do what you want, and after a few cycles of this you find just a few sequences dominating the population. The pools can easily reach 10^14 examples and more, because you don't need a separate container/experiment for each one, but do it all together in one batch. The keyword is SELEX, a pretty cool idea: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Systematic_evolution_of_ligand...

I don't know if ChatGPT translated your rate for the 2026 paper right, but it says you mean:

* 99.8% of the starting molecules fail to form the desired product

* The ones that do, form 0.026 bonds per hour