Dresden 2017 – wissenschaftliches Programm

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BP: Fachverband Biologische Physik

BP 20: Posters - Physics of the Genesis of Life (Focus Session)

BP 20.9: Poster

Dienstag, 21. März 2017, 14:00–16:00, P1A

Modeling a mechanism for pre-biotic selection and organization — •Varun Giri¹ and Sanjay Jain^2,3 — ¹Department of Biological Experimental Physics, Saarland University, Saarbrücken, Germany — ²Department of Physics and Astrophysics, University of Delhi, Delhi, India — ³Santa Fe Institute, Santa Fe, New Mexico, United States of America

Large molecules such as proteins are crucial for life. Production of these molecules requires good catalysts, and the only good catalysts known today are themselves large molecules. For the origin of life this presents a chicken-and-egg problem in chemistry. We use a mathematical model based on an artificial but pre-biotically plausible chemistry to investigate how certain specific chemical species can be selected out of a large set of possible combinations. We further describe a cascading mechanism by which large and improbable molecules are formed relatively easily in our system, thereby making more plausible the appearance of macromolecules like proteins, RNAs, etc., in pre-biotic settings. We start by considering a set of small molecules and construct a network of chemical reactions amongst these molecules and their reaction products. We find that under certain circumstances, autocatalytic sets (ACSs) come to dominate the chemistry in that the concentrations of the molecules belonging to an ACS are much higher than the background. We study the conditions under which large catalysts can appear starting from chemistries comprising of small molecules and later dominate the system.