Regensburg 2019 – scientific programme

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BP: Fachverband Biologische Physik

BP 23: Biomaterials and biopolymers I (joint session BP/CPP)

BP 23.2: Talk

Thursday, April 4, 2019, 09:45–10:00, H10

Heat and light - non-equilibrium tools to break early symmetry — Matthias Morasch¹, Corinna Kufner², Stefan Krebs³, Hannes Mutschler⁴, Wolfgang Zinth⁵, Dieter Braun¹ und •Christof Mast¹ — ¹Systems Biophysics, LMU Munich, Amalienstr. 54, 80799 Munich, Germany — ²Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, Harvard University, 60 Garden Street, Cambridge, MA 02138 — ³Gene Center, LMU Munich, Feodor-Lynen-Straße 25, 81377 Munich, Germany — ⁴MPI Biochemistry, Am Klopferspitz 18, 82152 Martinsried, Germany — ⁵BMO, LMU Munich, Öttigenstrasse 67, 80538 Munich, Germany

Modern lifeforms perpetuate their highly evolved molecular structures by using them to convert external energy-fluxes for self-replication and evolution. It is an open question how this closed cycle could start around four billion years ago. At that time, no sophisticated enzymes were available to initiate that process from the initially random and racemic pool of early prebio-polymers. We investigate how physical non-equilibria could help this issue by breaking early symmetry and locally enrich oligomer pools with a reduced sequence space and with a homochiral backbone. We are especially interested in the effect of thermal gradients across small water-filled pores and of incident UVlight. Thermal convection chambers could have selected for interacting, hence homochiral, sequences by their thermophoretic and lengthdependent concentration while UV-light is known to damage oligomers in a sequence dependent manner.