Niles Lehman
Short biography
Niles Lehman is Professor of Chemistry at Portland State University. His research group is part of the Center of Life in Extreme Environments (CLEE). He and his group work on the biochemical and genetic issues involved with the origins of life on the Earth, pursuing the hypothesis that recombination was a critical feature of nascent life, and may have been the defining element of the chemistry to biology transition some 4 billion years ago. Niles Lehman is Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Molecular Evolution.
Cooperation among RNA molecules promotes group replication
The origins of life on the Earth occurred some four billion years ago. The transition from chemistry to biology has traditionally been viewed as the advent of self-replicating genetic polymers that are subject to evolutionary forces. However, currently an alternative to this model is explored: an abiogenesis that relies on intermolecular cooperation rather than the selfish replication of distinct genotypes. The origins of life on Earth required the establishment of self-replicating chemical systems capable of maintaining and evolving biological information. It has been established that mixtures of RNA fragments spontaneously form cooperative catalytic cycles and networks, which seems to have been crucial for the origin of life. This “molecular cooperation” is a key factor in the origin of life. Polymers that assembled with other polymers might have been better protected against hydrolysis, for example, and as a result, started growing in number. Over time, these chemical systems could have “evolved” to be more stable and more complex. As more species of molecules joined the interactions, they may have created chemical networks that began to take on functions. Applying the principles of game theory to empirical chemical systems for perhaps the first time, it can be seen that cooperation, even at the molecular level, was a key feature of the origins of life.
