Regensburg 2025 – wissenschaftliches Programm
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BP: Fachverband Biologische Physik
BP 26: Synthetic life-like systems and Origins of Life
BP 26.1: Vortrag
Donnerstag, 20. März 2025, 09:30–09:45, H46
Heat flows through rock cracks purify life's building blocks and protect RNA from hydrolysis — •Paula Aikkila1, Thomas Matreux2, Dieter Braun1, and Christof Mast1 — 1Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München — 2ESPCI Paris
The emergence of biopolymer building blocks is a crucial step during the origins of life. However, their synthesis pathways usually require feedstocks of pure reactants and defined purification and mixing steps to suppress unwanted side reactions, which is required for high product yields. We show that heat flows through thin crack-like compartments purify complex mixtures of prebiotically relevant building blocks and drive prebiotically relevant reactions such as the dimerization of glycine. In these same compartments, we furthermore study how heat-flows can locally switch on and off pH gradients, thereby enabling or disabling RNA hydrolysis depending on their hybridization state. We seek to explore how this enables spontaneous symmetry breaking in the sequence and folding space, possibly facilitating the emergence of functional ribozyme.
Keywords: RNA; hydrolysis; pH; origin of life; non-equilibrium