New Spin On Origins of Evolvability: Competition to Survive Not Necessary?

Scientists have long observed that species seem to have become increasingly capable of evolving in response to changes in the environment. But computer science researchers now say that the popular explanation of competition to survive in nature may not actually be necessary for evolvability to increase.   In a paper published this week inPLOS ONE, the researchers report that evolvability can increase over generations regardless of whether species are competing for food, habitat or other factors.  Using a simulated model they designed to mimic how organisms evolve, the researchers saw increasing evolvability even without competitive pressure.

Science Direct - Apr. 26, 2013

Joel Lehman, Kenneth O. Stanley.

Evolvability Is Inevitable: Increasing Evolvability without the Pressure to Adapt. 

PLoS ONE, 2013; 8 (4): e62186 DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0062186

Mars May Have Supported Life: Martian Underground Could Contain Clues to Life's Origins

Minerals found in the subsurface of Mars, a zone of more than three miles below ground, make for the strongest evidence yet that the red planet may have supported life, according to research "Groundwater activity on Mars and implications for a deep biosphere," published inNature Geoscience on January 20, 2013.
Science Daily, Jan 20, 2013

Joseph R. Michalski, et al.

Wright.Groundwater activity on Mars and implications for a deep biosphere.

Nature Geoscience, 2013; DOI:10.1038/ngeo1706

Y-chromosome evolution: emerging insights into processes of Y-chromosome degeneration

The human Y chromosome is intriguing not only because it harbours the master-switch gene that determines gender but also because of its unusual evolutionary history. The Y chromosome evolved from an autosome, and its evolution has been characterized by massive gene decay. Recent whole-genome and transcriptome analyses of Y chromosomes in humans and other primates, in Drosophila species and in plants have shed light on the current gene content of the Y chromosome, its origins and its long-term fate. Furthermore, comparative analysis of young and old Y chromosomes has given further insights into the evolutionary and molecular forces triggering Y-chromosome degeneration and into the evolutionary destiny of the Y chromosome.

Doris Bachtrog
Nature Reviews Genetics 14, 113-124 (February 2013) | doi:10.1038/nrg3366

Researchers Identify Water Rich Meteorite Linked To Mars Crust

NASA-funded researchers analyzing a small meteorite that may be the first discovered from the Martian surface or crust have found it contains 10 times more water than other Martian meteorites from unknown origins.
This new class of meteorite was found in 2011 in the Sahara Desert. Designated Northwest Africa (NWA) 7034, and nicknamed "Black Beauty," it weighs approximately 11 ounces (320 grams). After more than a year of intensive study, a team of U.S. scientists determined the meteorite formed 2.1 billion years ago during the beginning of the most recent geologic period on Mars, known as the Amazonian.

NASA Mission News - Jan. 3, 2012
Science DOI: 10.1126/science.1228858

Origin of Life: Hypothesis Traces First Protocells Back to Emergence of Cell Membrane Bioenergetics

A coherent pathway -- which starts from no more than rocks, water and carbon dioxide and leads to the emergence of the strange bio-energetic properties of living cells -- has been traced for the first time in a major hypothesis paper in Cell this week.
Science Daily on Dec. 20, 2012
Reference : Nick Lane, William F. Martin. The Origin of Membrane Bioenergetics.
Cell, 2012; 151 (7): 1406

Astronomers detect nearest Earth-like neighbour

Scientists have been surprised by the unexpected discovery of a nearby solar system using a new experimental technique.  The system of five planets ranging in size from two to six times the Earth's mass orbiting the Sun-like star Tau Ceti, just 12 light years away.
ABC News
http://arxiv.org/abs/1212.4058

Bit by Bit: The Darwinian Basis of Life

All known examples of life belong to the same biology, but there is increasing enthusiasm among astronomers, astrobiologists, and synthetic biologists that other forms of life may soon be discovered or synthesized. This enthusiasm should be tempered by the fact that the probability for life to originate is not known. As a guiding principle in parsing potential examples of alternative life, one should ask: How many heritable “bits” of information are involved, and where did they come from? A genetic system that contains more bits than the number that were required to initiate its operation might reasonably be considered a new form of life.

Science Daily, May 8, 2012

Joyce GF (2012) Bit by Bit: The Darwinian Basis of Life. 

PLoS Biol 10(5): e1001323. doi:10.1371/journal.pbio.1001323

Scientists Prove Plausibility of New Pathway to Life's Chemical Building Blocks

For decades, chemists considered a chemical pathway known as the formose reaction the only route for producing sugars essential for life to begin, but more recent research has called into question the plausibility of such thinking. Now a group from The Scripps Research Institute has proven an alternative pathway to those sugars called the glyoxylate scenario, which may push the field of pre-life chemistry past the formose reaction hurdle.
Science Daily, Jan. 31, 2012

Vasudeva Naidu Sagi, et al.

Exploratory Experiments on the Chemistry of the “Glyoxylate Scenario”: Formation of Ketosugars from Dihydroxyfumarate. 

Journal of the American Chemical Society, 2012; : 120113151919003 DOI:10.1021/ja211383c

Scientists Discover New Clue to Chemical Origins of Life

Organic chemists at the University of York have made a significant advance towards establishing the origin of the carbohydrates (sugars) that form the building blocks of life.  A team led by Dr Paul Clarke at York has re-created a process which could have occurred in the prebiotic world.  They have made the first step towards showing how simple sugars -- threose and erythrose -- developed.   All biological molecules have an ability to exist as left-handed forms or right-handed forms. All sugars in biology are made up of the right-handed form of molecules and yet all the amino acids that make up the peptides and proteins are made up of the left-handed form. The researchers found using simple left-handed amino acids to catalyse the formation of sugars resulted in the production of predominately right-handed form of sugars. It could explain how carbohydrates originated and why the right-handed form dominates in nature.
Science Daily, Jan. 24, 2012

Laurence Burroughs, et al.

Asymmetric organocatalytic formation of protected and unprotected tetroses under potentially prebiotic conditions. 

Organic & Biomolecular Chemistry, 2012; DOI: 10.1039/C1OB06798B

The evolutionary significance of ancient genome duplications

Many organisms are currently polyploid, or have a polyploid ancestry and now have secondarily 'diploidized' genomes. This finding is surprising because retained whole-genome duplications (WGDs) are exceedingly rare, suggesting that polyploidy is usually an evolutionary dead end. We argue that ancient genome doublings could probably have survived only under very specific conditions, but that, whenever established, they might have had a pronounced impact on species diversification, and led to an increase in biological complexity and the origin of evolutionary novelties.

Yves Van de Peer, et al.
Nature Reviews Genetics 10, 725-732 (October 2009) | doi:10.1038/nrg2600