A new study has explored the origins of Earth and said that approximately 4 billion years ago, life on the planet could have started as a hiccup instead of a roar roughly 4 billion years ago. As per reports, template-assisted replication could have led to change from monomers to self-replicating polymers.

Template-assisted replication assists in making polymers longer and it also passes on sequences from generation to generation.

According to lead researcher Alexei Tkachenko at Brookhaven National Laboratory, they made attempts to understand between basic physical systems to other things that could act in a life-like manner and pass on information.

A new model that has been explained in the Journal of Chemical Physics put forward a potential mechanism as a result of which self-replication could have appeared. According to it, template-assisted ligation could have helped polymers become self-replicating.

According to Tkachenko, "We tried to fill this gap in understanding between simple physical systems to something that can behave in a life-like manner and transmit information". Tkachenko conducted the research together with Sergei Maslov, who is a professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

The model has a limitation that the researchers are looking forward to tackle in future studies. It is that all polymer sequences have equal chances of occurring.