SKM 2023 – wissenschaftliches Programm

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BP: Fachverband Biologische Physik

BP 10: Evolution and Origin of Life

BP 10.2: Vortrag

Dienstag, 28. März 2023, 10:00–10:15, BAR 0106

Non-equilibrium approaches to the origin of life — Thomas Matreux¹, Paula Aikkila¹, Corinna Kufner², Dominik Bucher³, Almuth Schmid¹, Wolfgang Zinth¹, Dieter Braun¹, and •Christof Mast¹ — ¹LMU, Munich, Germany — ²Harvard, Cambridge, USA — ³TUM, Munich, Germany

Life is an out-of-equilibrium process, so its emergence must also have been decisively shaped and driven by the non-equilibrium systems present 4 billion years ago. We investigated how simple heat fluxes through geological networks of interconnected chambers created chemical niches from complex mixtures of prebiotically relevant substances, each with different prevailing concentration ratios. These "micro-labs" could thus enable a wide variety of prebiotic reactions and massively increase their yield and selectivity compared to bulk systems. We further measured the sequence selectivity of UV radiation on pseudo-genomes built from subsets of codon sequences. Comparison with existing chronologies for codon and amino acid evolution suggests the importance of UV light as a selection pressure during the evolution of early life.