Regensburg 2025 – scientific programme

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BP: Fachverband Biologische Physik

BP 14: Poster Session I

BP 14.21: Poster

Tuesday, March 18, 2025, 10:00–12:30, P3

Phase-separation enhances sequence selection via templated ligation — •Manav Koul, Ivar Haugerud, and Christoph Weber — Universität Augsburg, Universitätsstraße 2, 86159 Augsburg

The emergence of highly selective catalytic sequences was a crucial step towards the origin of life. templated ligation of RNA has been proposed as a pre-biotic mechanism to achieve self-replicating sequences without complex machinery. A question remains as to how sufficiently long and abundant templates can emerge from short nucleotides in a non-conducive prebiotic pool. As phase separation has been shown to provide versatile hubs of correlated sequences, we investigate its role in facilitating and directing templated ligation. To this end, we develop a non-equilibrium thermodynamic model to describe the oligomerization of sequences and their ligation at non-dilute conditions in phase-separated systems. We find that phase-separation enhances the selection pressure of this mechanism, resulting in a sequence distribution dominated by highly structured sequence of low entropy. Our results highlight that out-of-equilibrium condensed phases could provide versatile hubs for Darwinian-like evolution toward functional sequences, both relevant for the molecular origin of life and de-novo life.

Keywords: non-equilibrium thermodynamics; liquid-liquid phase separation; molecular evolution; non-dilute chemical kinetics; catalysis and sequence selection theory