Reconstructing the first Darwinian machines of early Earth

Institutskolloquium

  • Datum: 20.11.2020
  • Uhrzeit: 10:30 - 12:00
  • Vortragender: Prof. Dr. Dieter Braun
  • Ort: Zoom Meeting Room 1
  • Raum: Zoom Raum 1
  • Gastgeber: IPP
  • Kontakt: daniel.told@ipp.mpg.de

Microscale nonequilibria for the emergence of life

Dieter Braun

LMU Munich, Center for Nanoscience

The Origin of Life is one of the fundamental, unsolved riddles of modern science. Life is a stunningly complex non-equi­librium process that keeps its local entropy low to drive the Darwinian evolution of informational polymers. It is straightforward to argue that first living systems were jump-started in natural non-equilibrium settings.

In a cross-disciplinary, world-wide effort, we are assembling a chain of experimental evidence using non-equilibrium micro­systems to drive Darwinian evolution autonomously. Our hypothesis focuses on geological temperature gradients across pores of rock. The most recent results explore physical mechanisms of self-amplification such as phase transitions1, thermophoresis2 to enhance polymerization3, symmetry breaking by ligation networks in sequence space4, capillary flow and wet-dry cycles in air-water systems5 and thermal molecule flow traps6 to support and sustain the replication of the first RNA or DNA.

Above experiments are part of the collaborative research center “Emergence of Life” and the Excellence Cluster “Origins” in Munich. Our mission is to combine the puzzle pieces from different disciplines into one experimental scenario to reconstruct the first steps of life in the lab.

References

  1. Morasch, Matthias, Dieter Braun, and Christof B. Mast. "Heat-Flow-Driven Oligonucleotide Gelation Separates Single-Base Differences." Angewandte Chemie 128.23 (2016): 6788-6791.

  2. Keil, Lorenz MR, et al. "Proton gradients and pH oscillations emerge from heat flow at the microscale." Nature communications 8.1 (2017): 1897.

  3. Mast, Christof B., et al. "Escalation of polymerization in a thermal gradient." PNAS 110.20 (2013): 8030-8035.

  4. Toyabe, Shoichi, and Dieter Braun. "Cooperative Ligation Breaks Sequence Symmetry and Stabilizes Early Molecular Replication." Physical Review X 9.1 (2019): 011056.

  5. M. Morasch, J. Liu, C.F. Dirscherl, A. Ianeselli, A. Kühnlein, K. Le Vay, P. Schwintek, S. Islam, M.K. Corpinot, B. Scheu, D.B. Dingwell, P. Schwille, H. Mutschler, M.W. Powner, C.B. Mast & D. Braun, “Heated gas bubbles enrich, crystallize, dry, phosphorylate and encapsulate prebiotic molecules.”, Nature Chemistry (2019), doi.org/10.1038/s41557-019-0299-5

  6. Kreysing, Moritz, et al. "Heat flux across an open pore enables the continuous replication and selection of oligonucleotides towards increasing length." Nature chemistry 7.3 (2015): 203.

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