Stochastic parabolic growth promotes coexistence and a relaxed error threshold in RNA-like replicator populations

The RNA world hypothesis proposes that during the early evolution of life, primordial genomes of the first self-propagating evolutionary units existed in the form of RNA-like polymers. Autonomous, non-enzymatic, and sustained replication of such information carriers presents a problem, because product formation and hybridization between template and copy strands reduces replication speed. Kinetics of growth is then parabolic with the benefit of entailing competitive coexistence, thereby maintaining diversity. Here, we test the information-maintaining ability of parabolic growth in stochastic multispecies population models under the constraints of constant total population size and chemostat conditions. We find that large population sizes and small differences in the replication rates favor the stable coexistence of the vast majority of replicator species (‘genes’), while the error threshold problem is alleviated relative to exponential amplification. In addition, sequence properties (GC content) and the strength of resource competition mediated by the rate of resource inflow determine the number of coexisting variants, suggesting that fluctuations in building block availability favored repeated cycles of exploration and exploitation. Stochastic parabolic growth could thus have played a pivotal role in preserving viable sequences generated by random abiotic synthesis and providing diverse genetic raw material to the early evolution of functional ribozymes.