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

INSPIRE奖的部分资金来自生物科学局分子和细胞生物科学部的分子生物物理组、物理部的生命系统物理学计划和数学和物理科学局化学部的生命过程化学计划。一个长期存在的重大挑战问题是，生命系统是如何从物理化学相互作用中产生的。化学是如何变成生物学的？非定向化学反应什么时候开始利用健康，变得自私自利，开始与他人竞争，并经历达尔文式的进化？如果成功，这个项目将提供一个可信的假设，说明随机链序列如何导致信息传递链，因为化学变成了生物，并有可能导致新的聚合物材料不仅是自组织的，而且实际上是自进化的。将采用理论和实验相结合的方法来实施这一具有挑战性和风险的项目。这是一个潜在的变革性项目，因为人们对序列特异性聚合物，如蛋白质和肽类折叠分子，如何通过随机单体序列的随机过程产生的了解很少。生命是如何从化学中产生的问题是科学界最引人注目、最长期存在的问题之一。例如，通过新陈代谢优先或代码优先的机制，人们对RNA世界、膜世界的生命起源做出了很多假设，但很少有人关注核心问题，即达尔文自私的类生物行为是如何从非达尔文化学中产生的。这是一个长期存在的基本问题，这个项目风险很高，因为正是在生命起源领域的性质中，任何从化学提出的生命起源的特定机制都将受到怀疑。识别聚合物序列空间中的功能结构域的复杂性是如此巨大，理论和实验都必须非常紧密地合作来解决这个问题。从实验上解决这个问题的工具是最近才开发出来的。聚合物合成的进展第一次达到了令人兴奋的地步：人们现在可以通过精确控制单体序列和长度来合成非天然聚合物，并将这些链组装成蛋白质样的结构。这种能力使人们能够测试最基本的问题，即聚合物链中的信息含量如何影响其结构和功能。

This INSPIRE award is partially funded by the Molecular Biophysics Cluster in the Division of Molecular and Cellular Biosciences in the Directorate for Biological Sciences; the Physics of Living Systems Program in the Division of Physics, and the Chemistry of Life Processes Program in the Division of Chemistry in the Directorate of Mathematical and Physical Sciences.The objective of this INSPIRE project is to understand the earliest steps in prebiotic evolution. A longstanding grand-challenge question is how living systems arose from physico-chemical interactions. How did chemistry become biology? When did undirected chemical reactions begin to capitalize on fitness, become self-serving, start competing with others, and undergo Darwinian evolution? If successful, this project will provide a plausible hypothesis for how random chain sequences could have led to information-transmitting chains, as chemistry becomes biology and potentially to new polymeric materials that are not just self-organizing, but are actually self-evolving. An integrated approach of theory and experiment will be used to carry out this challenging and risky project. This is a potentially transformative project because very little is understood about how sequence-specific polymers, such as proteins and peptoid foldamers, could arise through stochastic processes from random monomer sequences. Questions of how life arose from chemistry are among the most compelling and longstanding in science. Much has been hypothesized about origins of life in the RNA world, membrane world, by metabolism-first or code-first mechanisms, for example, but very little of this discussion focuses on the central question of how Darwinian self-serving bio-like behavior arose from non-Darwinian chemistry. This is a long-standing fundamental question and this project is high-risk because it is in the nature of the origins-of-life field that any particular mechanism proposed for the origin of life from chemistry will be met with skepticism. The complexity of identifying functional domains in polymer sequence space is so vast, both theory and experiment must work very closely together to address this problem. The tools to approach this problem experimentally have only just recently been developed. Advances in polymer synthesis have reached an exciting point for the first time: one can now synthesize non-natural polymers with exact control of monomer sequence and length, and assemble these chains into protein-like architectures. This capability allows one to test the most fundamental questions about how information content in polymer chains impacts their structure and function.