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NASA finds Titan's lakes may be creating vesicles with primitive cell walls

(www.sciencedaily.com)
277 points Gaishan | 1 comments | 10 Sep 25 00:10 UTC | HN request time: 0.001s | source
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andrewflnr ◴[10 Sep 25 00:59 UTC] No.45191739[source]▶
The linked paper is open access: https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/international-journa...

Among other things, it contains details on what amphiphiles might actually be present on Titan, a very nice set of diagrams explaining their proposed process, and proposals for lab experiments to verify whether the process is possible. I've had a soft spot for the vesicle-first theory of abiogenesis since I first heard of it, so I hope someone runs the experiments. But as far as I can tell, this is all theoretical so far.

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rolph ◴[10 Sep 25 01:28 UTC] No.45191950[source]▶
amphiphillic vesicles are a stepping stone for persistent molecular forms. essentially a reaction vessel, insulating the contents from the extravesicular mayhem.
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jojobas ◴[10 Sep 25 04:10 UTC] No.45193162[source]▶
It's thought that life on Earth started with RNA mayhem, not with vessels to isolate from it.
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1. griffzhowl ◴[10 Sep 25 18:54 UTC] No.45202082[source]▶
> It's thought that life on Earth started with RNA mayhem, not with vessels to isolate from it.

They're not mutually exclusive. You could have various kinds of autocatalytic sets of molecules, including RNA, inside and outside lipid vesicles, and some of them might have re-produced better than others. Anything that could have happened in an open ocean of nuleotides and amino acids could also take place within a lipid vesicle, just that within some vesicle maybe the right concentrations of molecules had at some point emerged that could more easily reproduce itself than in the open ocean where the particular autocatalytic set could be washed away by the surrounding molecular chaos.