Bridging Non-Living And Living Matter
Steen Rasmussen
Los Alamos National Laboratory
EES-5, MS E407
Los Alamos, NM 87545
(505) 665-0052
(505) 665-3687 FAX
I see a new Institute for Complex Adaptive Matter (ICAM) as natural place where material science, chemistry and biology meet and learn from each other. A central focus area within ICAM should be to investigate the transition from non-living to living matter. This can be done through molecular self-assembly and molecular self-organization processes, by creating molecular aggregates that are able to self-reproduce, feed from the environment as well as undergo evolution. Molecular systems with each of the above functionalities have already been produced in many laboratories, but an integration is still to be developed.
Such an effort would be congruent with the rapidly growing effort that NASA is sponsoring under the new Astrobiology Institute initiative. The activities within this area, among other things, seek to understand the origins of life, identify possible life-forms on Mars and Europe as well as identify ways to (re-) create protocells in the laboratory.
Los Alamos is a natural place where such work can be conducted and a team within the NASA Astrobiology context has already been established with members from theory, simulation as well as experiments.
A simple experimental, step-by-step process has been developed to create a protocell consisting of the three elements: a self-reproducing vesicle, an autocatalytic production of electron shuttling molecules and an autocatalytic production of self-replicating, templating polymers. This task is simple enough to accomplish within a five year period, but also complex enough as no single discipline can handle it alone as it involves a further development of experimental and theoretical knowledge from chemistry, material science and biology.
By addressing the issues of how to create a protocell great science with a huge technological impact is bound to happen. To create such a molecular machine we need to address experimental and theoretical issues of nonlinearities, interface dynamics, phase transitions, multiscale dynamics and dynamical hierarchies.