Earth, a planetary PCR machine to create life, or the brief history of a tRNA

Juan Jimenez

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arXiv · 2501.14436

Earth, a planetary PCR machine to create life, or the brief history of a tRNA

Juan Jimenez

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Abstract

About 4 billion years ago, the Earth probably fulfilled the environmental conditions necessary to favour the transition from primitive chemistry to life. Based on a theoretical hairpin duplication origin of tRNAs and their putative peptide-coding capability before ribosomes existed, here I postulate that, at this hypothetical environment, Earth's daily temperature cycles could have provided a unique planetary thermocycler to create self-replicating RNA hairpins that simultaneously templated amino acids polymerization in a primordial PCR well of prebiotic molecules. This early RNA hairpin-peptide interaction could have established a reciprocal nucleopeptide replicator that paved the way for catalytic translation and replication machineries towards the origin of LUCA.

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Juan Jimenez. 2025-01-24. Earth, a planetary PCR machine to create life, or the brief history of a tRNA. https://arxiv.org/abs/2501.14436

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