OoL digest — July 11th edition

Good morning from Montreal! In this week’s digest: in the field of astrobiology we have Lex Fridman’s podcast featuring Sara Walker on the origin of life methane in Enceladus’s plumes as a possible biosignature. In biochemistry, Schuster discusses possible ancestral nucleobases, OoLEN member Cyrille Jeancolas analyzes a self-reproductive recombinase ribozyme, and Bernardes shows that Chlamydomonas reinhardtii develops mutations providing the first steps towards multicellularity. In planetary science, Mitchell suggests that changes in Earth’s orbit may explain how life survived Showball Earth. Happy reading !

Astrobiology

Bayesian analysis of Enceladus’s plume data to assess methanogenesis – Affholder et al. – Nature Astronomy

The Origin of Life on Earth and Alien Worlds – Sara Walker – Lex Fridman Podcast


Biochemistry

Water-Soluble Supramolecular Polymers of Paired and Stacked Heterocycles: Assembly, Structure, Properties, and a Possible Path to Pre-RNA – Schuster et al. – Journal of the American Chemical Society

RNA diversification by a self-reproducing ribozyme revealed by deep sequencing and kinetic modelling – Jeancolas et al. – Chemical Communications

The evolution of convex trade-offs enables the transition towards multicellularity – Bernardes et al. – Nature Communications


Planetary Science

Orbital forcing of ice sheets during snowball Earth – Mitchell et al. – Nature Communications