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Chemical Evolution of Self-Replicating Molecules Observed In a Lab (nature.com)
New submitter n0w4k writes: Researchers at the University of Groningen have developed a self-replicating system able to not only pass hereditary information from one generation to another, but also mutate (non-paywalled link to the paper). It is a crucial step towards Darwinian evolution of abiotic species and artificial life. According to the authors and perhaps somewhat counterintuitively, in order to fully reach this goal, a death mechanism needs to be implemented in the system. Otherwise new species can only form but not disappear.
Self-replicating chemical systems have been widely studied before; some were even able to mutate. However, this discovery provides the first example of mutating replicators which are fully artificial.
Full disclosure: I am one of the co-authors; you can ask me if you have some specific questions or suggestions — maybe they can be implemented in the lab!
Self-replicating chemical systems have been widely studied before; some were even able to mutate. However, this discovery provides the first example of mutating replicators which are fully artificial.
Full disclosure: I am one of the co-authors; you can ask me if you have some specific questions or suggestions — maybe they can be implemented in the lab!
To me it's also obvious, but judging from the conversations with colleagues in the field (who are chemists, not evolutionary biologists), destruction of replicators is generally neglected. The challenge has been to just make molecules which can replicate and it is even more difficult to make them evolve because you need at least one bit of information that can assume 0 or 1 state, translated into chemical structures. Such error-prone replication process is enough to generate diversity of replicators but without extinction, the only selection pressure is on the replication efficiency and not survival.
The idea of reducing with Darwinian evolution to chemical kinetics (replication and destruction of replicators) has been nicely outlined by Addy Pross, who introduced the concept of dynamic kinetic stability:
dX/dt = kMX - gX,
where X is the concentration of the replicator, M is the concentration of 'food' and k and g are the rate constants (efficiencies) for the replication and destruction processes.
So far we only got the first part of the equation and colleagues from the lab got some promising results implementing the second part.
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