Abstract: The environment in which life emerged almost certainly involved stochastic variations (“noise”) in the composition and concentration of molecular components, catalysts, fluid flow, temperature, and other conditions. Wächtershäuser, de Duve, and others have postulated that thioesters (or sulfur containing compounds) may have played a critical role in early metabolism, primarily as chemical reservoirs of energy. For these theories to have merit, conditions would have needed to exist where mixtures of “molecular reactions” could compete to form biologically relevant products. Our current efforts demonstrate that noise, remarkably, could sometimes stabilize, rather than destabilize, a complex behavior in reaction networks. I will discuss a i) possible path by which simple, individual chemical reactions self-assemble spontaneously into the dissipative networks that now form the basis of all metabolism, and ii) how the transition from ‘molecules’ into ‘life’ may have benefitted from, and in some cases required, the chaotic conditions of the early Earth.
LOCATION:Northwest Building, Room 353, 52 Oxford Street, Cambridge, MA STATUS:CONFIRMED DTSTART:20200206T140000Z DTEND:20200206T153000Z END:VEVENT END:VCALENDAR