Abiogenesis News - Self Organising Organic Molecules Add Another Possibility to The Theory of Abiogenesis

A new model describes the self-organization of catalysts involved in metabolic cycles. Different species of catalysts (represented by different colors) form clusters and can chase each other.

© MPI-DS / LMP

Fig. 4: Oscillatory dynamics for an odd number of species with chasing cross-interactions.

A schematic representation of the oscillatory dynamics (left), snapshots of molecular dynamics simulations (middle, see also Supplementary Movie 8), and a diagram of the corresponding species interactions and pairing (right) are shown side by side. Here, dashed and dotted lines represent respectively the pairs on the left and right of the schematic representation. The eigenvalues of the system are as in Fig. 3b, but now Re(λ)<Im(λ) for the most unstable conjugate pair, so that the dynamics of the system are oscillatory.

Ouazan-Reboul, V., Agudo-Canalejo, J. & Golestanian, R. (2023).

Exploring the origins of life | Max Planck Institute for Dynamics and Self-Organization

Creationists would have us believe that science can't explain how 'life' arose from 'non-life', as though 'life' is some magical, mysterious substance, which, when added to inorganic chemicals, turns them into organic, living, substances. whereas of course, 'life' is simply a term for the active metabolic processes that resist entropy by using the energy stored in organic molecules, involving nothing more than the operation of the laws of chemistry and physics. That energy ultimately comes from the sun via photosynthesis, or, more rarely, geothermal energy via chemosynthesis.

What is life?

The question for science then, is how did inorganic molecules become organised in such a way that they can carry out these metabolic processes, and for that there is almost an embarrassment of explanations, most of which require conditions and time that would be impossible to replicate in a laboratory.

For a plausible ten-step process towards abiogenesis, see: Perfectly Plausible Abiogenesis.

And now to add more to the embarrassment of riches that is the growing science of abiogenesis, scientists from the Max Planck Institute for Dynamics and Self-Organization (MPI-DS), Göttingen, Germany have shown in two studies that catalytic molecules can form metabolically active clusters by creating and following concentration gradients.

As explained in an MPI-DS news release:

Exploring the origins of life

A new model helps to understand the self-organization of molecules into living structures

Catalytic molecules can form metabolically active clusters by creating and following concentration gradients – this is the result of a new study by scientists from the Max Planck Institute for Dynamics and Self-Organization (MPI-DS). Their model predicts the self-organization of molecules involved in metabolic pathways, adding a possible new mechanism to the theory of the origin of life. The results can help to better understand how molecules participating in complex biological networks can form dynamic functional structures, and provide a platform for experiments on the origins of life.

Catalytic molecules form clusters in the model, which are dynamically broken up again by other molecules. This form of self-organization enables the creation of metabolic cycles.

One possible scenario for the origin of life is the spontaneous organization of interacting molecules into cell-like droplets. These molecular species would form the first self-replicating metabolic cycles, which are ubiquitous in biology and common throughout all organisms. According to this paradigm, the first biomolecules would need to cluster together through slow and overall inefficient processes. Such slow cluster formation seems incompatible with how quickly life has appeared. Scientists from the department of Living Matter Physics from MPI-DS have now proposed an alternative model that explains such cluster formation and thus the fast onset of the chemical reactions required to form life.

For this, we considered different molecules, in a simple metabolic cycle, where each species produces a chemical used by the next one. The only elements in the model are the catalytic activity of the molecules, their ability to follow concentration gradients of the chemicals they produce and consume, as well as the information on the order of molecules in the cycle.

Vincent Ouazan-Reboul, first author
Max Planck Institute for Dynamics and Self-Organization
Am Fassberg 17
Göttingen, Germany

Consequently, the model showed the formation of catalytic clusters including various molecular species. Furthermore, the growth of clusters happens exponentially fast. Molecules hence can assemble very quickly and in large numbers into dynamic structures.

In addition, the number of molecule species which participate in the metabolic cycle plays a key role in the structure of the formed clusters. Ramin Golestanian, director at MPI-DS, summarizes:

Our model leads to a plethora of complex scenarios for self-organization and makes specific predictions about functional advantages that arise for odd or even number of participating species. It is remarkable that non-reciprocal interactions as required for our newly proposed scenario are generically present in all metabolic cycles.

Ramin Golestanian, Corresponding author
Max Planck Institute for Dynamics and Self-Organization
Am Fassberg 17
Göttingen, Germany

In another study, the authors found that self-attraction is not required for clustering in a small metabolic network. Instead, network effects can cause even self-repelling catalysts to aggregate. With this, the researchers demonstrate new conditions in which complex interactions can create self-organized structures.

Overall, the new insights of both studies add another mechanism to the theory of how complex life once emerged from simple molecules, and more generally uncover how catalysts involved in metabolic networks can form structures.

The scientists' studies are published open access in Nature Communications and arXiv. Sadly the latter is behind a paywall but includes a number of fascinating, open access movies:

Abstract

One of the greatest mysteries concerning the origin of life is how it has emerged so quickly after the formation of the earth. In particular, it is not understood how metabolic cycles, which power the non-equilibrium activity of cells, have come into existence in the first instances. While it is generally expected that non-equilibrium conditions would have been necessary for the formation of primitive metabolic structures, the focus has so far been on externally imposed non-equilibrium conditions, such as temperature or proton gradients. Here, we propose an alternative paradigm in which naturally occurring non-reciprocal interactions between catalysts that can partner together in a cyclic reaction lead to their recruitment into self-organized functional structures. We uncover different classes of self-organized cycles that form through exponentially rapid coarsening processes, depending on the parity of the cycle and the nature of the interaction motifs, which are all generic but have readily tuneable features.

Ouazan-Reboul, V., Agudo-Canalejo, J. & Golestanian, R.
Self-organization of primitive metabolic cycles due to non-reciprocal interactions. Nat Commun 14, 4496 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-023-40241-w

Copyright: © [year] The authors.
Published by [publisher]. Open access
Reprinted under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license (CC BY 4.0)

Just another piece of the jigsaw puzzle to be fitted in as more of the picture is revealed by science, and, as always, creationists will continue to set the bar at an impossible height for science to clear whilst insisting that the bar for their own superstition should be at, or below ground-level, all the while changing the definition of 'life' to try to place it beyond the reach of science altogether.

---

Thank you for sharing!

Tweet Link