Omne Vivum Ex Vivo … Omne? How to Feed an Inanimate Evolvable Chemical System so as to Let it Self‐evolve into Increased Complexity and Life‐like Behaviour

Abstract

“What I cannot create, I do not understand.” Richard Feynman’s bon mot seems almost tailored for experimental systems chemists to realise an important step in the chemical sciences: the creation of living synthetic cells from the entirely inanimate. The underlying idea needs to be simple so the system can develop naturally. This proposal aims at the realisation, viz. finding sets of experimentally feasible initial conditions, exploring varied compositions and analysing their outcomes, of a fully synthetic chemical micro‐compartmented and evolvable macromolecular system being fed with monomers and small molecular weight, high energy compounds, to keep the system permanently out of thermodynamic equilibrium and let it self‐evolve, thus gaining: 1) import‐export control of macromolecules across the compartment membranes; 2) food‐dependent increase in macromolecular size, i.e., polymer length inside the compartments; 3) sustained production of new macromolecules through the establishment of a (or several) de novo genetic code(s); leading to 4) the emergence of replicating macromolecular populations; and 5) the emergence of self‐evolved synthetic living cells.

Open-Ended Evolution: Perspectives from the OEE Workshop in York

“…In particular, he highlighted recent work by Peter Strazewski on evolution in chemical systems: Strazewski argues that OEE is more likely if we move away from well-defined systems to messy systems with many possible variants (in chemical composition, property, reactivity, shape, size, etc.) [46]. Froese attempted to formalize this intuition by characterizing OEE in terms of a systemʼs emergence of new degrees of freedom (DoFs).…”

Bringing Prebiotic Nucleosides and Nucleotides Down to Earth

“…We should refrain from intuitively assuming that there is only "one way to RomeNA" ,a nd we are certain that with further progress in prebiotic systems chemistry,w here new synergies from mixing different prebiotic compound classes are being discovered, [15] organic chemists are looking into ab righter future than we have ever been able to imagine. [3]…”

“…Once afamily is sustainably supplied with food, running water, electricity, and waste processing, the chances become real that kith and kin will persist through reproduction. [3] Theprebiotic bricks of life as we know it are more or less of the composite type and can be roughly divided into four compound classes,1 ) a-amino acids,2 )polyhydroxyaldehydes,k etones,a nd polyols,3 )N-heterocycles,a nd 4) longalk(en)yl-chain fatty acids and alcohols.T hey should all covalently assemble (condense) in water, or without any solvent, under prebiotically and geochemically plausible reaction conditions from repeated units of similar fragments or molecules into macromolecules that bear aresemblance to Highlights Highlights 13931 [1] Prebiotic chemistry is currently av ery active field of scientific research;its task is to provide the bricks of life from "natural" and "plausible" chemical reaction conditions.…”

“…To this effect, we are still at the "wishful thinking" stage,a lthough concepts for experiments are being formulated. [3] Theprebiotic bricks of life as we know it are more or less of the composite type and can be roughly divided into four compound classes,1 ) a-amino acids,2 )polyhydroxyaldehydes,k etones,a nd polyols,3 )N-heterocycles,a nd 4) longalk(en)yl-chain fatty acids and alcohols.T hey should all covalently assemble (condense) in water, or without any solvent, under prebiotically and geochemically plausible reaction conditions from repeated units of similar fragments or molecules into macromolecules that bear aresemblance to known biomacromolecules,s uch as proteins (polypeptides), carbohydrates (polysaccharides), nucleic acids (polynucleotides), and lipid amphiphiles (phospholipids). Currently, prebiotic syntheses giving reasonable yields of specific a-amino acids [4] and N-heterocycles [5] are mastered best, followed by those of lipids [6] and sugars.…”

Spontaneous Formation of RNA Strands, Peptidyl RNA, and Cofactors

“…[3] Thee mergence of the earliest forms of life from inanimate material is likely to have involved ap hase in which biopolymers formed from monomers.T he ability of the resulting chemical systems to survive then depended on replication. [4] Further,d uring the emergence of the protein-RNAworld, [5,6] amolecular process must have existed that linked specific RNAs equences to specific peptide sequences so that one could encode the other and the latter could support the former through catalysis. [7] This process may have led to the genetic code.…”