A model of the virus-type strategy in the early stage of encoded molecular evolution.

Recent advances in evolutionary molecular engineering have revealed that the essential nature of a "virus" in the evolutionary aspect is its bonding strategy for assignment of the phenotype to its genotype. Based on the definition of "virus"-type and "cell"-type of the assignment strategy, we propose a virus-early/cell-late model of the history of life. The first encoded protein is assumed to be a cofactor of replication ribozyme in the RNA world and to be bound to its genetic RNA. As such a virus-type strategy could introduce the Darwinian selection process into the hypercycle with translation, a hypercycle with virus-like members could make the replicase protein and the translation system gradually evolve together out of the RNA world without a proto-cell. Moreover, they could evolve much faster by this virus-type strategy than by a primitive cellular organism.