Project description
Chasing the holy grail: the emergence of life as a collective property from chemicals in a lab
Our knowledge and understanding of the origin of the universe and its evolution, including the birth and death of stars and planets, have increased tremendously over the decades. Our understanding of the evolution of living organisms has similarly increased exponentially with pioneering technological advances supporting observation, measurement and analysis. What is still missing is the link between the two; the transition from non-living matter of the early universe to living matter and life as we know it, a process called abiogenesis. The EU-funded AbioEvo project is planning to shed light on this enigma, testing its RNA-based hypothesis and demonstrating the emergence of evolution by natural selection in a purely chemical system.
Objective
Abiogenesis, the transition from non-living to living matter, is at the core of the origin of life question. However, the dynamical processes underlying abiogenesis remain unknown.
The AbioEvo project aims to test the hypothesis that RNA-catalysed RNA recombination, if coupled with template-based mechanisms, provides a gradual route for the emergence of evolution by natural selection, starting from collective autocatalysis, toward template-based replication. Indeed, recombination allows both self-reproduction and shuffling of other sequences, thus, once combined with templating, provides the basic ingredients of reproduction, heredity and variation required for Darwinian evolution.
The project decomposes the problem into five steps: (WP1) the study of molecular-level mechanisms to generate and stabilize novel sequences by recombination and templating; (WP2) collective dynamics integrating these mechanisms into the properties of reproduction with heredity, variation, and selection, in order to establish proof-of-concepts of evolutionary modes; (WP3) viability thresholds of recombination-based replicators from increasingly random substrates; (WP4) conditions for open-ended evolution toward template-based replication; (WP5) experimentally informed theoretical estimates of the probability of the proposed evolutionary transitions.
The project would provide first demonstrations of evolution by natural selection in a purely chemical system, gradual and experimentally accessible paths from oligomers to template-based replication, and a method to evaluate prebiotic plausibility from sequence-to-function relationships, kinetics and evolutionary dynamics.
Fields of science
Programme(s)
Funding Scheme
ERC-COG - Consolidator GrantHost institution
75231 Paris
France