Agent-Based Modeling of a Minimal Protocell with 50-Nucleotide RNA for Proto-Translation: Emergent Life-Like Behaviors under the Matter World Hypothesis

The Matter World Hypothesis (MWH) posits that synergistic interactions among RNA, peptides, lipids, and catalytic extras drove the emergence of life in prebiotic environments. This study presents an Agent-Based Modeling (ABM) framework simulating 1,000 minimal protocells, each comprising 50-nucleotide (nt) RNA, short peptides (5–10 amino acids), lipid vesicles, montmorillonite, and Zn²⁺, over 1,000,000 steps (~1,000 division events) across wet-dry cycles, ice veins, and hydrothermal vents, with 2,500 replicates per environment. A codon-specific proto-translation module simulates explicit codon-anticodon pairing with 1–5% mistranslation probabilities per codon, catalyzed by an RNA aptamer rather than a ribosome to minimize complexity. The ABM reveals 60 ± 7% lineage divergence, allele fixation rates (0.06–0.10 per 10,000 steps), and proto-translation in 50 ± 8% of protocells, with robust statistical power (95% CI: ±0.8–1.5%) and moderate variance (±2.5–5.0% SD). Reactive oxygen species (ROS) spikes (5–15 events/100k steps) increase mutation and mistranslation rates by 5–10%, with robustness confirmed via bootstrap and Lévy flight analyses. This minimal protocell demonstrates self-replication, metabolism, homeostasis, and environmental responsiveness, offering insights into the simplest systems capable of life-like behaviors with implications for abiogenesis, astrobiology, and synthetic biology.All findings in this study are derived from advanced simulations and thus require empirical validation before drawing definitive conclusions.