Berlin 2012 – wissenschaftliches Programm

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SYOL: Symposium Origin of Life

SYOL 1: Symposium Origin of Life

SYOL 1.4: Hauptvortrag

Freitag, 30. März 2012, 11:00–11:30, H 0105

Systems chemistry: Self-replication and chiral symmetry breaking — •Guenter von Kiedrowski — Chair for Bioorganic Chemistry, Ruhr-University, Bochum, Germany

Self-replication is one of the major principles without life could not exist. Whether the origin of self-replication is identical to the origin of the hypothetical RNA world or whether it existed at an earlier stage of evolution is an open question that has stimulated chemists to search for systems capable of making copies of itselves via autocatalytic reactions. As self-replication means autocatalysis plus information transfer, the reaction products must necessarily be able to store more structural information than their precursors. Templating as a means to transfer structural information has been exploited since the first successful example of a chemical self-replicating system almost two decades ago. Today we have a broad variety of such systems employing oligonucleotides, peptides, and small organic molecules as templates and autocatalytic, cross-catalytic, collectively autocatalytic and non-autonomous (stepwise) schemes of self-replication. Chirality and the spontaneous emergence of optical activity, viz. chiral symmetry breaking may be seen either as the key prerequisite to allow for self-replication of proto-biomolecular structures, or, as a systemic result of self-replication when starting from prochiral precursors. For example, while PNA as well as a recently described small organic replicator are achiral entities, the introduction of variant prochiral building blocks are expected to yield chiral replicators.