Precursor to life created in virtual lab

A virtual molecular laboratory has created a possible precursor to life say Danish scientists, which could have important implications for creating artificial living systems. Protocells are the simplest, most primitive living systems, and if scientists can create an artificial protocell, they gain a very basic ingredient for creating more advanced artificial life. But no one has yet managed to create an artificial protocell because it is challenging to create information strings – DNA or RNA – that can be inherited by offspring, including protocells. Scientists from the University of Southern Denmark say they have discovered information strings with peculiar properties in a virtual computer experiment. “Finding mechanisms to create information strings are essential for researchers working with artificial life,” said Professor Steen Rasmussen, head of the Centre for Fundamental Living Technology (FLINT) at the university. To create these information strings, scientists had to overcome two problems. Firstly, in life, long molecular strings decompose in water, making it difficult to maintain a population of long strings over time. Secondly, it’s difficult to make these molecules replicate without using modern enzymes. So they used ligation – the ability to connect any combination of two shorter strings into a longer one, assisted by a matching longer string. “In our computer simulation – our virtual molecular laboratory – information strings began to replicate quickly and efficiently as expected,” said Rasmussen. “However, we were struck to see that the system quickly developed an equal number of short and long information strings and further that a strong patterns selection on the strings had occurred.” “We could see that only very specific information patterns on the strings were to be seen in the surviving strings. We were puzzled: how could such a coordinated selection of string occur when we knew that we had not programmed it. The explanation had to be found in the way strings interacted with each other.” This so-called self-organising autocatalytic network was created in the virtual pot into which Rasmussen had poured the ingredients for information strings, and quickly evolved into a state where strings of all lengths existed in equal concentrations, which is not usually found. “We might have discovered a process similar to the processes that initially sparked the first life,” said Rasmussen. “We of course don’t know if life actually was created this way – but it could have been one of the steps. Perhaps a similar process created sufficiently high concentrations of longer information strings when the first protocell was created.” Structure and selection in an autocatalytic binary polymer model