Work

Foldamer hypothesis for the growth and sequence differentiation of prebiotic polymers

Year: 2017

Type: article

Abstract: Significance Today’s lifeforms are based on informational polymers, namely proteins and nucleic acids. It is thought that simple chemical processes on the early earth could have polymerized monomer units into short random sequences. It is not clear, however, what physical process could have led to the next level—to longer chains having particular sequences that could increase their own concentrations. We study polymers of hydrophobic and polar monomers, such as today’s proteins. We find that even some random sequence short chains can collapse into compact structures in water, with hydrophobic surfaces that can act as primitive catalysts, and that these could elongate other chains. This mechanism explains how random chemical polymerizations could have given rise to longer sequence-dependent protein-like catalytic polymers.

Source: Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences

DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1620179114

Authors: Elizaveta Guseva, Ronald N. Zuckermann, Ken A. Dill

Institutions: Stony Brook University, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Molecular Foundry

Language: English

Topic: Origins and Evolution of Life

Subfield: Astronomy and Astrophysics

Field: Physics and Astronomy

Domain: Physical Sciences

Open Access status: green

Funder: National Science Foundation

Award: INSPIRE Track 1: Origins-of-life and self-evolving polymeric materials