Regensburg 2016 – wissenschaftliches Programm

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BP: Fachverband Biologische Physik

BP 18: Posters - DNA, RNA and Related Enzymes

BP 18.6: Poster

Montag, 7. März 2016, 17:30–19:30, Poster C

Thermally driven length selection increases RNA self-replication rates — •Juan M. Iglesias Artola and Moritz Kreysing — MPI-CBG, Dresden, Germany

It is widely believed that modern life on Earth was preceded by RNA molecules able to store information and to catalyze their own replication. In recent years a vast amount of effort has been dedicated to the understanding of how RNA molecules manage to replicate, and indeed a cross-catalytic replication cycle has been demonstrated experimentally[1]. However, it remains unclear how such multi-component reaction networks[2] could have self-assembled under prebiotic conditions. Particularly problematic seems the strongly non-linear concentration dependence of ligation rates, which necessitates high substrate concentrations in order to guarantee temporal persistence of the replication cycle. Using the R3C ligase as a model system, we show how a recently described thermally imbalanced micro-environment[3] is suitable to increase ligation rates by orders of magnitude through a) active accumulation of RNA strands in a small compartment, b) selection of successfully ligated products, and c) separation from inhibitory hydrolysis products. For the origin of life, we consider environmentally altered reaction kinetics key to reach reproduction rates in excess of significant decay rates; a pre-requisite not only to sustain reaction of a dilute model replicator, but also a requirement for replication networks to arise spontaneously. Refs.: [1] Lincoln et al. Science 323 (2009), [2] Higgs et al, N. Nat. Rev. Genet. 16 (2015), [3] Kreysing, et al. Nat. Chem. 15 (2015),