Increasing the survival interval and decreasing the formative interval make improving the proteins even more important. Their increased efficiency and stability as components of membranes and enzymes will have a very significant selective advantage as will their regular distribution to daughter protocells. At this point the advantage of informed proteins--proteins from information-containing templates--becomes obvious. Such templates can ensure selective formation of the needed proteins; this does not happen in reflexive catalysis. The latter process probably generates many useless proteins (in terms of cell survival) for each useful protein generated. Also, distribution of a few templates could be an efficient way of assuring that protocells can form needed proteins.
How could such a template system arise? We are still speculating here, but we can be guided by the known dependence of protein formation today on nucleic acid templates. Perhaps ribonucleic acid was the first template that absorbed the amino acids needed to form a selectively advantageous enzyme, for instance. If so, that nucleic acid would also be selected for. And if a DNA molecule assured formation of the needed RNA, it too would be selected for. Today these speculations are taking the form of research into the transfer RNA molecules as being the first informed nucleic acids.
We know that nucleic acids are maintained in cells. We also know that their precursors are concentrated and preserved in cells. The interior of protocells may, therefore, be the most likely place in which nucleic acids formed spontaneously, and in which if a nucleic acid that could act as a template were formed, it would be selected for. This point of view might get us around our present impasse of postulating the spontaneous formation of nucleic acids in a nonliving environment. Evolution of the template might have followed a path that is the reverse of today's protein synthesis. But that path would form the basis for understanding protein biosynthesis.