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Thermosynthesis may still occur in some terrestrial and extraterrestrial environments. However, no organisms are known at present that use thermosynthesis as a source of energy, although it is possible that it might occur in extraterrestrial environments where no light is available, such as on the subsurface ocean that may exist on the moon Europa. Thermosynthesis also permits a simple model for the origin of photosynthesis. It has moreover been used to explain the origin of by symbiogenesis of benthic sessile thermosynthesizers at hydrothermal vents during the of the Precambrian. Preliminary experiments have started to attempt to isolate thermosynthetic organisms.
The thermosynthesis concept, biological free energy gain from thermal cycling, is combined with the concept of the RNA World. The resulting overall origin of life model suggests new explanations for the emergence of the genetic code and the ribosome. It is proposed that the first protein named pF(1) obtained the energy to support the RNA World by a thermal variation of F(1) ATP synthase's binding change mechanism. It is further proposed that this pF(1) was the single translation product during the emergence of the genetic machinery. During thermal cycling pF(1) condensed many substrates with broad specificity, yielding NTPs and randomly constituted protein and RNA libraries that contained self-replicating RNA. The smallness of pF(1) permitted the emergence of the genetic machinery by selection of RNA that increased the fraction of pF(1)s in the protein library: (1) an amino acids concatenating progenitor of rRNA bound to (2) a chain of 'positional tRNAs' linked by mutual recognition, and yielded a pF(1) (or its main motif); this positional tRNA set gradually evolved to a set of regular tRNAs functioning according to the genetic code, with concomitant emergence of (3) an mRNA coding for pF(1).
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