From Chemical Communities to Genetic Systems: The Synechite Framework for the Emergence of Biological Information

How prebiotic chemistry transitioned into systems capable of stable heredity remains a central unresolved problem in origin-of-life research. Existing frameworks involving catalytic polymers, autocatalytic networks, metabolic organization, compartmentalization, and other forms of chemical self-organization explain important aspects of increasing molecular complexity, yet an important conceptual question remains: how could hereditary continuity arise before the emergence of mature sequence-based genetic systems? Here, we propose the Synechite framework, a theoretical model in which early evolutionary organization emerges within persistent, interacting chemical communities rather than exclusively through isolated molecular replicators. A Synechite is conceived as a dynamically maintained chemical organization whose functional continuity can persist despite molecular turnover, environmental interaction, and compositional change. Within such systems, compositional memory can arise when retained, accumulated, redistributed, or reorganized chemical components and relationships allow prior organization to influence subsequent states. Such continuity does not require identical molecular composition, a fixed boundary, or organism-like division. The framework proposes a progression of overlapping evolutionary regimes beginning with persistent chemical organization, followed by compositional memory and differential persistence, increasingly transferable and cumulative hereditary organization, and the integration of sequence-based heredity. These regimes are not treated as obligatory or strictly sequential stages. Material exchange, chemical flow, accumulation, fragmentation, transport, environmental variation, structural reorganization, and ecological filtering may operate simultaneously and generate substantial diversity among chemical organizations. Environmental conditions may not merely filter existing organizations but, through reciprocal interaction with chemical dynamics, help stabilize, reorganize, and progressively elaborate viable organizational regimes. Physical division or fragmentation may contribute to continuity and propagation, but neither is required to define a Synechite. Sequence-dependent polymers are consequently interpreted not as the origin of informational continuity, but as increasingly precise hereditary mechanisms emerging within already organized chemical systems. Compositional and sequence-based memory may coexist, interact, reinforce, compete, and progressively reorganize one another, producing transitional dual-memory regimes in which hereditary information becomes increasingly precise, stable, portable, and concentrated within molecular sequences while remaining embedded within broader chemical organization. The Synechite framework therefore reframes the origin of heredity as a problem of persistent organizational continuity and progressive reorganization rather than solely the appearance of a first replicating molecule. It proposes a possible pathway linking prebiotic chemical communities, compositional memory, transferable organizational influence, environmental coupling, differential persistence, cumulative evolution, and sequence-based genetic heredity. The framework remains a theoretical and testable hypothesis rather than an experimentally established reconstruction of life's origin. Its central empirical question is whether chemically plausible systems can retain historically contingent organization, interact reciprocally with their environments, reorganize into persistent configurations, influence subsequent chemical states, and transmit sufficient organizational continuity for cumulative evolutionary change to occur before fully developed genetic replication.