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The Evolution of Enzyme Specificity in the Metabolic Replicator Model of Prebiotic Evolution

The chemical machinery of life must have been catalytic from the outset. Models of the chemical origins have attempted to explain the ecological mechanisms maintaining a minimum necessary diversity of prebiotic replicator enzymes, but little attention has been paid so far to the evolutionary initiat...

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Autores principales: Könnyű, Balázs, Czárán, Tamás
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: Public Library of Science 2011
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3116859/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21698204
http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0020931
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author Könnyű, Balázs
Czárán, Tamás
author_facet Könnyű, Balázs
Czárán, Tamás
author_sort Könnyű, Balázs
collection PubMed
description The chemical machinery of life must have been catalytic from the outset. Models of the chemical origins have attempted to explain the ecological mechanisms maintaining a minimum necessary diversity of prebiotic replicator enzymes, but little attention has been paid so far to the evolutionary initiation of that diversity. We propose a possible first step in this direction: based on our previous model of a surface-bound metabolic replicator system we try to explain how the adaptive specialization of enzymatic replicator populations might have led to more diverse and more efficient communities of cooperating replicators with two different enzyme activities. The key assumptions of the model are that mutations in the replicator population can lead towards a) both of the two different enzyme specificities in separate replicators: efficient “specialists” or b) a “generalist” replicator type with both enzyme specificities working at less efficiency, or c) a fast-replicating, non-enzymatic “parasite”. We show that under realistic trade-off constraints on the phenotypic effects of these mutations the evolved replicator community will be usually composed of both types of specialists and of a limited abundance of parasites, provided that the replicators can slowly migrate on the mineral surface. It is only at very weak trade-offs that generalists take over in a phase-transition-like manner. The parasites do not seriously harm the system but can freely mutate, therefore they can be considered as pre-adaptations to later, useful functions that the metabolic system can adopt to increase its own fitness.
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spelling pubmed-31168592011-06-22 The Evolution of Enzyme Specificity in the Metabolic Replicator Model of Prebiotic Evolution Könnyű, Balázs Czárán, Tamás PLoS One Research Article The chemical machinery of life must have been catalytic from the outset. Models of the chemical origins have attempted to explain the ecological mechanisms maintaining a minimum necessary diversity of prebiotic replicator enzymes, but little attention has been paid so far to the evolutionary initiation of that diversity. We propose a possible first step in this direction: based on our previous model of a surface-bound metabolic replicator system we try to explain how the adaptive specialization of enzymatic replicator populations might have led to more diverse and more efficient communities of cooperating replicators with two different enzyme activities. The key assumptions of the model are that mutations in the replicator population can lead towards a) both of the two different enzyme specificities in separate replicators: efficient “specialists” or b) a “generalist” replicator type with both enzyme specificities working at less efficiency, or c) a fast-replicating, non-enzymatic “parasite”. We show that under realistic trade-off constraints on the phenotypic effects of these mutations the evolved replicator community will be usually composed of both types of specialists and of a limited abundance of parasites, provided that the replicators can slowly migrate on the mineral surface. It is only at very weak trade-offs that generalists take over in a phase-transition-like manner. The parasites do not seriously harm the system but can freely mutate, therefore they can be considered as pre-adaptations to later, useful functions that the metabolic system can adopt to increase its own fitness. Public Library of Science 2011-06-16 /pmc/articles/PMC3116859/ /pubmed/21698204 http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0020931 Text en Könnyű, Czárán. http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are properly credited.
spellingShingle Research Article
Könnyű, Balázs
Czárán, Tamás
The Evolution of Enzyme Specificity in the Metabolic Replicator Model of Prebiotic Evolution
title The Evolution of Enzyme Specificity in the Metabolic Replicator Model of Prebiotic Evolution
title_full The Evolution of Enzyme Specificity in the Metabolic Replicator Model of Prebiotic Evolution
title_fullStr The Evolution of Enzyme Specificity in the Metabolic Replicator Model of Prebiotic Evolution
title_full_unstemmed The Evolution of Enzyme Specificity in the Metabolic Replicator Model of Prebiotic Evolution
title_short The Evolution of Enzyme Specificity in the Metabolic Replicator Model of Prebiotic Evolution
title_sort evolution of enzyme specificity in the metabolic replicator model of prebiotic evolution
topic Research Article
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3116859/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21698204
http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0020931
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