admin

Virus capsids mediate the transfer of viral genetic information from one cell to another, thus the origin of the first viruses arguably coincides with the origin of the viral capsid. Capsid genes are evolutionarily ancient and their emergence potentially predated even the origin of first free-living cells. But does the origin of the capsid coincide with the origin of viruses, or is it possible that capsid-like functionalities emerged before the appearance of true viral entities? We set to investigate this question by using a computational simulator

Microbial life was well established and widespread by the Paleoarchean; however, the degree of evolutionary advancement such as microbial motility, intra- and inter-species interactions, phototropism, or oxygenic photosynthesis by that time remains highly debated. The 3.22 Ga Moodies Group in the Barberton Greenstone Belt (BGB, South Africa) are Earth's oldest well-preserved siliciclastic tidal deposits. They exhibit a unique assemblage of microbial mats, providing an excellent opportunity to decipher the morphological adaptations of microbial communities to different paleoenvironmental settings.

With more than 1500 detected and confirmed exoplanets within a large range of dierent configurations of size, mass, chemical composition and distance from their host’s star, the probability to find a planet that look like the Earth increases every year. While it is clear that being in the habitable zone did not imply being habitable, “life” indeed requires strong favourable conditions, a systematic study of the evolution of the habitable zone is required to account for its dependence upon stellar parameters.

During the last century a number of authors pointed to the inherently systemic and dynamic nature of the living, yet their message was largely ignored by the mainstream of the scientific community. Tibor Ganti was one of those early pioneers, proposing a theoretical framework to understand the living principles in terms of chemical transformation cycles and their coupling. The turn of the century then brought with it a novel 'systems' paradigm, which shined light on all that previous work and carried many implications for the way we conceive of chemical and biological complexity today. In this article tribute is paid to some of those seminal contributions, highlighting the importance of adopting a systems view in present chemistry, particularly if plausible mechanisms of chemical evolution toward the first living entities want to be unraveled.

In order to facilitate its detection in astronomical observations, the measurement of the rotational spectrum of acrylic acid has been extended to 397 GHz using a free space cell at room temperature. 295 new lines were assigned to the s-cis conformer and 286 new lines to the s-trans conformer of acrylic acid. Using the determined experimental parameters, the predictions of the rotational transition frequencies up to 900 GHz and their intensities were obtained at temperatures of 100 and 200 K and at room temperature.

The weakly bound 1:1 complex between acrylonitrile (CH2=CHCN) and water has been characterized spectroscopically in the millimeter wave range (59.6-74.4 GHz) using a Free Jet Absorption Millimeter Wave spectrometer. Precise values of the rotational and quartic centrifugal distortion constants have been obtained from the measured frequencies of the normal and isotopically substituted water moiety (DOH, DOD, H18OH).

Biological regulation is what allows an organism to handle the effects of a perturbation, modulating its own constitutive dynamics in response to particular changes in internal and external conditions. With the central focus of analysis on the case of minimal living systems, we argue that regulation consists in a specific form of second -order control , exerted over the core (constitutive) regime of production and maintenance of the components that actually put together the organism. The main argument is that regulation requires a distinctive architecture of functional relationships, and specifically the action of a dedicated subsystem whose activity is dynamically decoupled from that of the constitutive regime.

The activation of dipeptides was studied in the perspective of the abiotic formation of oligopeptides of significant length as a requirement for secondary structure formation. The formation of piperazin-2,5-diones (DKP), previously considered as a dead end when activating free dipeptides, was shown in this work to be efficiently suppressed when using strong activating agents (e.g., carbodiimides). This behaviour was explained by the fast formation of a 5(4H)-oxazolone intermediate at a rate that exceeds the time scale of the rotation of the peptide bond from the predominant trans-conformation into the cis-isomer required for DKP formation.

The main goal of this work is to study element ratios that are important for the formation of planets of dierent masses. Our results demonstrate the importance of Galactic chemical evolution and indicate that it may play an important role in the planetary internal structure and composition. The results also show that abundance ratios may be a very relevant issue for our understanding of planet formation and evolution.

The Europlanet 2020 Research Infrastructure (RI) is a project to integrate and support planetary science activities across Europe. The project is funded under the European Commission’s Horizon 2020 programme; it was launched on 1st September 2015 and will run until 31 August 2019. The project has 34 beneficiary institutions from 19 European countries. Europlanet 2020 RI will address key scientific and technological challenges facing modern planetary science by providing open access to state-of-the-art research data, models and facilities across the European Research Area.