Question

 

1. Explain in your own words what hypercycles are and why they are important during the origin of life. Explain Eigen's paradox and how hypercycles could help resolve Eigen's paradox. Give an example of conflict that can arise in a hypercycle and how this conflict could be resolved. Give an example of enhanced cooperation that could arise in a hypercycle and the conditions under which it could be selected.

2. The gap between eukaryotic and prokaryotic cells is one of the largest discontinuities in biology. (i) Explain in your own words what steps might have bridged this gap and (ii) what the evidence is for each step. (iii) Connect the multi-level selection steps for ETIs given in lecture with the steps you give in part (i), making sure to give your reasoning why a step in part (i) corresponds to the multilevel selection step you choose.

Answer 1

HYPERCYCLES: It is a hypothetical stage of macromolecular evolution where all these macro molecules are connected in a way such that each molecule act as a catalyst of creating the succeeding molecule.

IMPORTANCE OF HYPERCYCLES IN ORIGIN OF LIFE:

Hypercycles are the necessary intermediate stage to explain the concept of appearance of enzyme polymerase which is essential for the replication of RNA and the replication of RNA molecules that could code the said polymerases production.

EIGEN'S PARADOX:

The essence of Eigen’s paradox which is often called as "error catastrophe" is whatever genetic information an evolving molecule gets stored in it gets eventually destroyed before it can use it to replicate because of errors which creeps into it eventually. To minimize the errors, the molecules needed to be of certain length but to achieve that length sya 2000 base pairs the emerging replicators must stay the same which wont be allowed due to errors in coding.

HYPERCYCLES AND EIGEN'S PARADOX:

With limited set of codons and by undergoing Hypercycle evolution, the said macromolecule hypothetically attain the length required by autocatalyzing and once it reaches the length it will lead to the replication of the said molecule with the accquired new length of say RNA which becomes an accurate replicator.