摘要
Life has existed on Earth for most of the planet’s history, yet major gaps and unresolved questions remain about how it first arose and persisted. Early Earth posed numerous challenges for life, including harsh and fluctuating environments. Today, many organisms cope with such conditions by entering a reversible state of reduced metabolic activity, a phenomenon known as dormancy. This process protects inactive individuals and minimizes the risk of extinction by preserving information that stabilizes life-system dynamics. Here, we develop a framework for understanding dormancy on early Earth, beginning with a primer on dormancy theory and its core criteria. We hypothesize that dormancy-like mechanisms acting on chemical precursors in a prebiotic world may have facilitated the origin of life. Drawing on evidence from phylogenetic reconstructions and the fossil record, we demonstrate that dormancy is prevalent across the tree of life and throughout deep time. These observations lead us to consider how dormancy might have shaped nascent living systems by buffering stochastic processes in small populations, protecting against large-scale planetary disturbances, aiding dispersal in patchy landscapes and facilitating adaptive radiations. Given that dormancy is a fundamental and easily evolved property on Earth, it is also likely to be a feature of life elsewhere in the universe.
摘要译文
在地球的大部分历史中，生命一直存在于地球上，但关于生命最初是如何形成和持续的，仍然存在重大空白和未解决的问题。 早期地球给生命带来了许多挑战，包括恶劣和波动的环境。 今天，许多生物体通过进入代谢活性降低的可逆状态来应对这种状况，这种现象被称为休眠。 这个过程保护不活跃的个体，通过保存稳定生命系统动态的信息，将灭绝的风险降到最低。 在这里，我们建立了一个了解早期地球休眠的框架，从休眠理论及其核心标准的入门开始。 我们假设，在益生元世界中，作用于化学前体的类似休眠的机制可能促进了生命的起源。 根据系统发育重建和化石记录的证据，我们证明休眠在生命树和整个深层时间里普遍存在。 这些观察使我们思考，休眠是如何通过缓冲小种群的随机过程、防止大规模行星扰动、帮助在斑驳的景观中扩散以及促进适应性辐射来塑造新生生命系统的。 考虑到休眠是地球上一个基本的和容易进化的属性，它也可能是宇宙中其他地方生命的一个特征。
Kevin D. Webster;Jay T. Lennon. Dormancy in the origin, evolution and persistence of life on Earth[J]. Proceedings of the Royal Society of London B: Biological Sciences, 2025,292(2038)