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COMMENTARY
An RNA-making reactor for the origin of life
National Center for Biotechnology Information, National Library of Medicine, National Institutes of Health, Bethesda, MD 20894
Given the overwhelming complexity and difficulty of the origin of life problem, the most astonishing thing about it is that life actually has evolved on at least one planet in our universe (1). Indeed, it is entirely conceivable that the origin of life involved a series of highly unlikely events, and a substantial part of the explanation for why there is life on earth comes from the anthropic principle (2), i.e., our planet just happens to be one of the extremely rare parts of the universe where such a series of events was realized (3). The anthropic world view, however, by no means frees the students of early evolution from the obligation to explore all possible ways to decrease the improbability of life by demonstrating plausible paths to one or another of the milestones that need to be reached before life actually takes off. The paper by Baaske et al. (4) in this issue of PNAS seems to do just that by describing a simple abiotic system ensuring striking concentration of mono- and polynucleotides in inorganic compartments that might be suitable hatcheries for life.
Spatial compartmentalization is an essential condition for the functioning of biological systems. In modern cells, compartmentalization is provided by an elaborate, highly evolved system of membranes that serve to maintain the integrity of the cell and, at the same time, provide effective means
*E-mail: koonin@ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
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