Published In
Life
Document Type
Article
Publication Date
10-16-2017
Subjects
RNA -- Evolution, Evolutionary genetics, Molecular evolution, Cooperation, Life -- Origin, Ribozymes
Abstract
Cooperation is essential for evolution of biological complexity. Recent work has shown game theoretic arguments, commonly used to model biological cooperation, can also illuminate the dynamics of chemical systems. Here we investigate the types of cooperation possible in a real RNA system based on the Azoarcusribozyme, by constructing a taxonomy of possible cooperative groups. We construct a computational model of this system to investigate the features of the real system promoting cooperation. We find triplet interactions among genotypes are intrinsically biased towards cooperation due to the particular distribution of catalytic rate constants measured empirically in the real system. For other distributions cooperation is less favored. We discuss implications for understanding cooperation as a driver of complexification in the origin of life.
DOI
10.3390/life7040038
Persistent Identifier
http://archives.pdx.edu/ds/psu/25354
Citation Details
Mathis, C. et al. 2017. Prebiotic RNA network formaton: A taxonomy of molecular cooperation. Life, 7(4):38.
Description
Copyright 2017 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/)