<p>The mathematician John von Neumann, through his work on universal constructors, discovered<br />a generalized version of the central dogma of molecular biology biology in the 1940s, long&#160; <br />before the biological version had been discovered. While his discovery played no role in the&#160; <br />development of molecular biology, we may benefit from a similar mathematical approach to find&#160; <br />clues on the origin of life. This then involves addressing those problems in the field that&#160; <br />do not depend on the details of organic chemistry. We can then consider a general set of&#160; <br />models that describe machines capable of self-maintenance and self-replication formulated in&#160; <br />terms of a set of building blocks and their interactions.&#160;</p>
<p>The analogue of the origin of life problem is then to explain how one can get to such&#160; <br />machines starting from a set of only building blocks. A fundamental obstacle one then faces&#160; <br />is the limit on the complexity of low fidelity replicating systems, preventing building&#160; <br />blocks from getting assembled randomly into low fidelity machines which can then improve due&#160; <br />to natural selection [1]. A generic way out of this problem is for the entire ecosystem of&#160; <br />machines to have been encapsulated in a micro-structure with fixed inner surface features&#160; <br />that would have boosted the fidelity [2]. Such micro-structures could have formed as a result&#160; <br />of the random assembly of building blocks, leading to so-called percolation clusters [2].</p>
<p>This then leads us to consider how in the real world a percolation process involving the&#160; <br />random assembly of organic molecules can be realized. A well studied process in the&#160; <br />literature is the assembly of organic compounds in ice grains due to UV radiation and heating&#160; <br />events [3,4,5]. This same process will also lead to the percolation process if it proceeds&#160; <br />for a sufficiently long period [2].</p>
<p>In this talk I will discuss the percolation process in more detail than has been done in [2],&#160; <br />explaining how it leads to the necessary symmetry breakings such as the origin of chiral&#160; <br />molecules needed to explain the origin of life. &#160;&#160;</p>
<p>&#160;</p>
<p>[1] Eigen, M., 1971. Self-organization of matter and the evolution of biological&#160; <br />macromolecules. Naturwissenschaften 58, 465-523.</p>
<p>[2] Mitra, S., 2019. Percolation clusters of organics in interstellar ice grains as the&#160; <br />incubators of life, Progress in Biophysics and Molecular Biology 149, 33-38.</p>
<p>[3] Ciesla, F., and Sandford.,S., 2012. Organic Synthesis via Irradiation and Warming of Ice&#160; <br />Grains in the Solar Nebula. Science 336, 452-454.</p>
<p>[4] Mu&#241;oz Caro, G., et al., 2002. Amino acids from ultraviolet irradiation of interstellar ice&#160; <br />analogues. Nature 416, 403-406.</p>
<p>[5] &#160;Meinert, C,., et al., 2016. Ribose and related sugars from ultraviolet irradiation of&#160; <br />interstellar ice analogs. Science 352, 208-212.</p>
Comment on “Ribose and related sugars from ultraviolet irradiation of interstellar ice analogs”
