Cooperation is essential for evolution of biological complexity. Recent work has shown game theoretic arguments, commonly used to model biological cooperation, can also illuminate the dynamics of chemical systems. Here we investigate the types of cooperation possible in a real RNA system based on the Azoarcus ribozyme, by constructing a taxonomy of possible cooperative groups. We construct a computational model of this system to investigate the features of the real system promoting cooperation.

Standard techniques for studying biological systems largely focus on their dynamical or, more recently, their informational properties, usually taking either a reductionist or holistic perspective. Yet, studying only individual system elements or the dynamics of the system as a whole disregards the organizational structure of the system—whether there are subsets of elements with joint causes or effects, and whether the system is strongly integrated or composed of several loosely interacting components.

The question of the existence of cancer is inadequately answered by invoking somatic mutations or the disruptions of cellular and tissue control mechanisms. As such uniformly random events alone cannot account for the almost inevitable occurrence of an extremely complex process such as cancer. In the different epistemic realm, an ultimate explanation of cancer is that cancer is a reversion of a cell to an ancestral pre-Metazoan state, i.e. a cellular form of atavism.

Over the last several hundred years of scientific progress, we have arrived at a deep understanding of the non-living world. We have not yet achieved an analogous, deep understanding of the living world. The origins of life is our best chance at discovering scientific laws governing life, because it marks the point of departure from the predictable physical and chemical world to the novel, history-dependent living world.

We present a commercially-available, fully-automated, offline chromatography method capable of simultaneously purifying both Ca and Sr for stable and radiogenic isotope analysis. The method features effective purification and mutual separation of Ca and Sr from complex matrixes using a single, highly-reusable chromatographic column. Low carryover combined with high yield for multiple extractions indicates the column can be reused for at least 200 samples.