Abstract
The emergence and maintenance of polymers with complex sequences pose a major question in the study of the origin of life. To answer this, we study a model polymerization reaction, where polymers are synthesized by stepwise ligation from two types of monomers, catalyzed by a long polymer as a template. Direct stochastic simulation and dynamical systems analysis reveal that the most dominant polymer sequence in a population successively changes, depending on the flow rate of monomers to the system, with more complex sequences selected at a lower flow rate. We discuss the relevance of this kinetic sequence selection through nonequilibrium flow to the origin of complex polymers.
Highlights
Schrödinger, in his celebrated monograph “What is Life” [1], recognized that the essence of a heredity carrier lies in aperiodic crystals, as was soon confirmed by the elucidation of DNA structure
Complex monomer sequences have been synthesized by reactions with templates as catalysts, which are synthesized via such template reaction
The polymerization processes are autocatalytic in nature, as has been extensively investigated [9,10,11,12,13,14,15,16], including theoretical models that explicitly consider templatelike self-replicating polymerization [8,17,18,19,20,21,22,23,24] and some synthesis experiments [6,25,26]
Summary
Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, The University of Tokyo, 3-8-1 Komaba, Meguro-ku, Tokyo 153-8902, Japan (Received 29 March 2018; revised manuscript received 21 June 2018; published 11 September 2018). Here, we study a template-catalyst polymerization model by a complementary sequence and demonstrate that the selected sequence of the template polymer depends critically on the flow rate, and more complex sequences are selected as the flow rate is decreased This selection mechanism is the kinetic, rather than energetic, selection of complex sequences (that include a variety of subsequences, which are defined later) without any specific design of energy dependence, as a result of changing the rate of external supply of monomers. As will be analyzed by dynamical systems and combinatorial analysis, complex sequences that are synthesized via diverse kinetic pathways from monomers are selected for a low flow rate The generality of this selection mechanism will be discussed with possible relevance to prebiotic polymer synthesis. While all the molecules in the container diffuse out at rate d
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