Thermosynthesis as energy source for the RNA World: a new model for the origin of life

Abstract

The thermosynthesis concept, biological free energy gain from thermal cycling, is combined with the concept of the RNA World. The resulting overall origin of life model gives new explanations for the emergence of the genetic code and the ribosome. The first protein named pF1 obtains the energy to support the RNA world by a thermal variation of F1 ATP synthase's binding change mechanism. This pF1 is the single translation product during the emergence of the genetic machinery. During thermal cycling pF1 condenses many substrates with broad specificity, yielding NTPs and randomly constituted protein and RNA libraries that contain (self)-replicating RNA. The smallness of pF1 permits the emergence of the genetic machinery by selection of RNA that increases the fraction of pF1s in the protein library: (1) a progenitor of rRNA that concatenates amino acids bound to (2) a chain of 'positional tRNAs' linked by mutual recognition, yielding a pF1 (or its main motif); this positional tRNA set gradually evolves to a set of regular tRNAs functioning according to the genetic code, with concomitant emergence of (3) an mRNA coding for pF1.