Periodic Reporting for period 4 - Autocat (Autocatalysis: A bottom-up approach to understanding the origins of life)
Période du rapport: 2020-11-01 au 2022-01-31
How life first began is still not well understood, neither is what exactly life is, so life is difficult to define, and it is difficult to decide what a minimal 'living system' is and how to characterise it. Understanding how living and non-living things are different, and learning how to generate minimal 'living' systems is a scientifically interesting question and could lead to the development of new technologies that we cannot yet envision.
Several independent, but highly interrelated, research lines in this project all aim to demonstrate how simple molecules can become involved in complex chemical reactions networks. The main objectives are to explore new autocatalytic reactions, and to learn how to study the complex systems generated. We also aim to mimic important biological phenomena using purely chemical systems; such as selection from a pool of different replicators and to see if we can observe evolution in these processes.
We are now able to able to make autocatalytic reactions that rely on simply mixing together two reactive components in water, and have characterised the complex mixtures of products produced, and how these self replicate. We are able to make self-assembled structures like micelles and vesicles that mimic soap bubble and / or the membranes of biological cells. we have developed chemistry where autocatalysis only occurs in the presence of 'another catalyst' so that we are seeing catalysed-catalysis and characterised the complex behaviour obtained. We have learned how to make self-replicators that are not thermodynamically stable, so that they decompose to other species - counterintuitively this produces much more life like systems than simple autocatalytic reactions because it more closely mimics how biological systems behave.
We have started experiments aimed at observing competition phenomena and evolution using our new self-replicators, and are working on devising ways to keep 'out of equilibrium' systems out of equilibrium in a controlled way.