Autocatalysis: A bottom-up approach to understanding the origins of life

Project Information

Autocat

Grant agreement ID: 681491

DOI

10.3030/681491

Project closed

EC signature date 27 March 2016

Start date 1 May 2016

End date 31 January 2022

Funded under

• EXCELLENT SCIENCE - European Research Council (ERC)

Total cost

€ 2 278 073,00

EU contribution

€ 2 278 073,00

Coordinated by

THE CHANCELLOR, MASTERS AND SCHOLARS OF THE UNIVERSITY OF OXFORD
United Kingdom

Periodic Reporting for period 4 - Autocat (Autocatalysis: A bottom-up approach to understanding the origins of life)

Reporting period: 2020-11-01 to 2022-01-31

Summary of the context and overall objectives of the project

This proposal focuses on the study of autocatalytic reactions that may be relevant to the origins of life. The overarching objective of this project is to understand how to generate minimal self-replicating systems using only simple chemical building blocks which mimic how biological systems behave.
How life first began is still not well understood, neither is what exactly life is, so life is difficult to define, and it is difficult to decide what a minimal 'living system' is and how to characterise it. Understanding how living and non-living things are different, and learning how to generate minimal 'living' systems is a scientifically interesting question and could lead to the development of new technologies that we cannot yet envision.
Several independent, but highly interrelated, research lines in this project all aim to demonstrate how simple molecules can become involved in complex chemical reactions networks. The main objectives are to explore new autocatalytic reactions, and to learn how to study the complex systems generated. We also aim to mimic important biological phenomena using purely chemical systems; such as selection from a pool of different replicators and to see if we can observe evolution in these processes.

Work performed from the beginning of the project to the end of the period covered by the report and main results achieved so far

We have developed a series of new autocatalytic reactions involving using different chemistries to form bonds, and we have examined in depth the relationship between structure and function in these systems and performed a series of mechanistic studies on how these new autocatalytic reactions operate and used the understanding of these systems gained in these studies in order to design improved systems.
We are now able to able to make autocatalytic reactions that rely on simply mixing together two reactive components in water, and have characterised the complex mixtures of products produced, and how these self replicate. We are able to make self-assembled structures like micelles and vesicles that mimic soap bubble and / or the membranes of biological cells. we have developed chemistry where autocatalysis only occurs in the presence of 'another catalyst' so that we are seeing catalysed-catalysis and characterised the complex behaviour obtained. We have learned how to make self-replicators that are not thermodynamically stable, so that they decompose to other species - counterintuitively this produces much more life like systems than simple autocatalytic reactions because it more closely mimics how biological systems behave.
We have started experiments aimed at observing competition phenomena and evolution using our new self-replicators, and are working on devising ways to keep 'out of equilibrium' systems out of equilibrium in a controlled way.

Progress beyond the state of the art and expected potential impact (including the socio-economic impact and the wider societal implications of the project so far)

While we anticipated being able to develop and characterise novel self-replicators and their dynamics, we did not anticipate (at the time the project was originally proposed) being able to generate far from equilibrium self-replicators and the huge amount of research that opens up. We anticipate that we will be able to deliver on observing some evolution-like processes before the end of the project and be able to control and take advantage of far-from-equilibrium replicators and gain control over their behaviour by consuming fuel and devising new self-replicators that have a type of metabolism. We have published much of our work from the first 30 months of this project in leading journals, which has been well received by the community and will facilitate the design (by ours and other groups) of new complex dynamic systems that mimic living systems

Autocatalysis figure