Novel Apparatuses for Incorporating Natural Selection Processes into Origins-of-Life Experiments to Produce Adaptively Evolving Chemical Ecosystems

Abstract

Origins-of-life chemical experiments usually aim to produce specific chemical end-products such as amino acids, nucleic acids or sugars. The resulting chemical systems do not evolve or adapt because they lack natural selection processes. We have modified Miller origins-of-life apparatuses to incorporate several natural, prebiotic physicochemical selection factors that can be tested individually or in tandem: freezing-thawing cycles; drying-wetting cycles; ultraviolet light-dark cycles; and catalytic surfaces such as clays or minerals. Each process is already known to drive important origins-of-life chemical reactions such as the production of peptides and synthesis of nucleic acid bases and each can also destroy various reactants and products, resulting selection within the chemical system. No previous apparatus has permitted all of these selection processes to work together. Continuous synthesis and selection of products can be carried out over many months because the apparatuses can be re-gassed. Thus, long-term chemical evolution of chemical ecosystems under various combinations of natural selection may be explored for the first time. We argue that it is time to begin experimenting with the long-term effects of such prebiotic natural selection processes because they may have aided biotic life to emerge by taming the combinatorial chemical explosion that results from unbounded chemical syntheses.