Theoretical origin of life: computer wishful thinking (Introduction)

by David Turell , Thursday, October 01, 2020, 18:58 (1296 days ago) @ David Turell

Using computer algorithms to find possible roads to life ,but the road from likely organic vital molecules is long and winding:

https://www.chemistryworld.com/news/algorithm-discovers-how-six-simple-molecules-could-...

"An organic synthesis algorithm has mapped out the thousands of reactions that might have converted abiotic compounds into the building blocks of life more than 3.5 billion years ago. Starting off with six simple precursors, the program discovered many known as well as 24 entirely new pathways to prebiotic molecules, and showed how catalytic and self-replicating systems might emerge.

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"Now, researchers have done just that. A team led by Bartosz Grzybowski and Sara Szymkuć from the Polish Academy of Sciences encoded all 500 known prebiotic reactions and a feedstock of six precursors – water, hydrogen cyanide, ammonia, hydrogen sulphide, nitrogen and methane – into open-use platform Allchemy. The algorithm then used encoded mechanistic chemistry rules to produce a map of their combinations.

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"Running the program for seven generations, each time combining the generated molecules with what came before, the researchers ended up with almost 35,000 compounds including 50 biotic ones. The program was able to find many prebiotic syntheses previously described in the literature, for example 10 pathways leading to the DNA component adenine. But it also discovered 24 entirely new pathways to biotic compounds – more than 20 of which the team experimentally validated.

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"One of the reasons computer programs are better at finding these pathways than humans, explains Szymkuć, is that ‘people aren’t accustomed, when designing something, to incorporate a step, which degrades a molecule, and that’s necessary for the cycle.’

"But the vast majority of reaction combinations led to abiotic compounds – molecules that were never incorporated into living systems. Analysis showed that the molecules that became the building blocks of life were more soluble in water and more thermodynamically stable. ‘The chosen ones had a balanced number of hydrogen bond donors and acceptors,’ Grzybowski adds. ‘When you think about it, this makes perfect sense – think about DNA. Nature chose molecules that are more likely to be fitting into a larger architecture, to build these kinds of supramolecular assemblies.’"

Comment: More intelligent design in the lab. What must happen naturally is much more complex.