Thermosynthesis

Muller's Biothermosynthesis

A Dutch biochemist and physicist Anthonie Muller wrote many papers on thermosynthesis since 1983. He defined thermosynthesis as: "Biological heat engines working on thermal cycling." also as: "Theoretical biological mechanism for free energy gain from thermal cycling, tentatively stated as the energy source for origin of life."

The thermosynthesis concept, biological free energy gain from thermal cycling, is combined with the concept of the RNA World. The resulting overall origin of life model suggests new explanations for the emergence of the genetic code and the ribosome. It is proposed that the first protein named pF(1) obtained the energy to support the RNA World by a thermal variation of F(1) ATP synthase's binding change mechanism. It is further proposed that this pF(1) was the single translation product during the emergence of the genetic machinery. During thermal cycling pF(1) condensed many substrates with broad specificity, yielding NTPs and randomly constituted protein and RNA libraries that contained self-replicating RNA. The smallness of pF(1) permitted the emergence of the genetic machinery by selection of RNA that increased the fraction of pF(1)s in the protein library: (1) an amino acids concatenating progenitor of rRNA bound to (2) a chain of 'positional tRNAs' linked by mutual recognition, and yielded a pF(1) (or its main motif); this positional tRNA set gradually evolved to a set of regular tRNAs functioning according to the genetic code, with concomitant emergence of (3) an mRNA coding for pF(1).

References

References

1. Anthonie W.J. Muller. (2001). "The thermosynthesis model for the origin of life: implications for Solar System exploration". Marsbugs.
2. Louis N. Irwin; Dirk Schulze-Makuch. (2008). "Life in the Universe: Expectations and Constraints (Advances in Astrobiology and Biogeophysics)". Springer.