2023-06-08 10:32:09
MADRID, 8 Jun. (EUROPA PRESS) –
Harvard researchers led by the Spanish Juan Perez-Mercader have created synthetic species without biochemistry and have observed that they function according to Darwinian evolutionary principles.
For more than 10 years, Pérez-Mercader, a principal investigator in Harvard’s Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences and the Origins of Life Initiative, has studied how to produce synthetic living systems, without relying on biochemistry or the chemistry that has enabled the life on earth. The purpose is to demonstrate the possibility of life forms on other planets that are unlike any on Earth..
“We have been trying to build a non-biochemical system, which without help is capable of executing the essential properties common to all natural living systems,” Pérez-Mercader explained.
The latest study from the Pérez-Mercader lab, published in Cell Reports Physical Science, even finds that such a system participates in what Charles Darwin called “the struggle for life.” They describe how they created two synthetic models (or “species”) and observed the subsequent competition between them.
Long before this study, the lab figured out how to create carbon-chemistry-based, non-biochemical systems called protocells. These are made up of self-assembling polymer vesicles that emerge from a homogeneous mix of smaller synthetic chemicals unrelated to living organisms. “These systems act like biochemical cells,” he said. it’s a statement Perez-Mercader. “They are born, they metabolize what they need, they grow, they move, they reproduce and maybe even evolve.”
Now the researchers wanted to see if these systems would operate according to the evolutionary principle of competitive exclusion. As we know from Darwin’s work, this involves the fight for survival, with the species with the greatest competitive advantage outperforming the other when competing for resources.
That’s why Pérez-Mercader and his team created two new species of protocells for this particular study, one with the advantage of light sensitivity and the other without. When the researchers looked at how these systems behaved while sharing food in a light environment, they saw that the light-sensitive “species” resisted while the others did not. “It is the struggle for existence where the most suitable structure in its environment survived”, Perez-Mercader said.
With these results, Pérez-Mercader is willing to go so far as to suggest that biochemicals are not essential in the fight for life. “This demonstrates that non-biochemical carbon chemistry can lead to the extinction of the less ‘fit’ protocell species,” he said.
His team’s findings raise the question: Could there be chemistries beyond Earth capable of implementing the fundamental properties of life?
“It is possible that there are materials that, once on a planetary surface somewhere with the right conditions, they can react chemically, self-organize, and perhaps do the things this experiment showsPerez-Mercader said.
Under the right circumstances, these materials can evolve from very simple chemistry to more complicated structures, he said. “I think that we should be very open about other life forms in other parts of the universe, and which may not resemble life as we now recognize it.”
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