SKM 2023 – scientific programme
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BP: Fachverband Biologische Physik
BP 10: Evolution and Origin of Life
BP 10.2: Talk
Tuesday, March 28, 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.