Abiogenesis

Hi Kuresu,
While several labs make their livings replicating DNA without using cells or organelles, or anything beyond an enzyme or two, that's probably not what Rob's looking for. Nonetheless, it dispells the blanket statement: However, there were two fairly elegant experiments performed in the early 1970s, one by Sol Spiegelman, the other by Leslie Orgel.Spiegelman's experiment (Spiegelman's Monster - Wikipedia) took a strand of RNA from a virus and was able to replicate it without adding anything besides a few nucleobases (essentially food). It replicated on its own, eventually forming a strand of nucleotides ~220 units in length. Further work has continued to decrease its length. This work was important because it very clearly showed that replication, selection, and evolution act even on simple chemical systems, and that autocatalysis goes beyond paper-theory and is easy to observe at work in the universe.Another approach was taken by Leslie Orgel, who, as opposed to Spiegelman's top-down approach (starting with viral RNA), used an RNA replicase enzyme to polymerize RNA to form long chains of RNA. Further work by Orgel, Jim Ferris, Dave Deamer, and others has continued to form long chains of RNA without the use of enzymes (using divalent cations, clays, and dehydration cycles with lipid vesicles, respectively), with these methods forming strands of nucleobases of a maximum of about 100 in length.So the points to take home are 1) catalytic molecule self-replicating molecules can be small, and 2) making small molecules that could eventually be self-replicating is easy.While personally, I think that there are other routes to the origin of genetic information than the pathways suggested by these researchers, these research projects are all promising and suggest that forming genetic information doesn't require cell-life.Hope this helps!