Two Brookhaven researchers developed theoretical model to
explain the origins of self-replicating molecules
(July 28, 2015) Nearly
four billion years ago, the earliest precursors of life on Earth emerged. First
small, simple molecules, or monomers, banded together to form larger, more
complex molecules, or polymers. Then those polymers developed a mechanism that
allowed them to self-replicate and pass their structure on to future
generations.
We wouldn't be here today if molecules had not made that
fateful transition to self-replication. Yet despite the fact that biochemists
have spent decades searching for the specific chemical process that can explain
how simple molecules could make this leap, we still don't really understand how
it happened.
Now Sergei Maslov, a computational biologist at the U.S.
Department of Energy's Brookhaven National Laboratory and adjunct professor at
Stony Brook University, and Alexei Tkachenko, a scientist at Brookhaven's
Center for Functional Nanomaterials (CFN), have taken a different, more
conceptual approach. They've developed a
model that explains how monomers could very rapidly make the jump to more
complex polymers. And what their model points to could have intriguing
implications for CFN's work in engineering artificial self-assembly at the
nanoscale. Their work is published in the July 28, 2015 issue of The Journal of
Chemical Physics.