Dresden 2017 – scientific programme

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BP: Fachverband Biologische Physik

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

BP 20.3: Poster

Tuesday, March 21, 2017, 14:00–16:00, P1A

The efficiency of driving chemical reactions by a physical non-equilibrium is kinetically controlled — •Tobias Göppel, Vladimir V. Palyulin, and Ulrich Gerland — Physics of Complex Biosystems, Physics Department, Technical University of Munich, James-Franck-Strasse 1, D-85748 Garching, Germany

An out-of-equilibrium physical environment can drive chemical reactions into thermodynamically unfavorable regimes. Under prebiotic conditions such a coupling between physical and chemical non-equilibria may have enabled the spontaneous emergence of primitive evolutionary processes. Here, we study the coupling efficiency within a theoretical model and focuses on generic effects arising whenever reactant and product molecules have different transport coefficients in a flow-through system.The physical non-equilibrium is represented by a drift-diffusion process, which is a coarse-grained description for the interplay between thermophoresis and convection, as well as for many other molecular transport processes. As a simple chemical reaction, we consider a reversible dimerization process, which is coupled to the transport process by different drift velocities for monomers and dimers. Within this minimal model, the coupling efficiency between the non-equilibrium transport process and the chemical reaction can be analyzed in all parameter regimes. The analysis shows that the efficiency depends strongly on the Damköhler number, a parameter that measures the relative timescales associated with the transport and reaction kinetics.