nai

Project Progress

The goal of our research program is to design, discover, and understand the primary factors responsible for directing self-organization of inanimate molecules into the animate chemistry of living systems. Our approach has been to rationally design and recreate various forms of autocatalytic peptide networks in the laboratory and study how the interplay of molecular information and nonlinear catalysis can lead to self-organization and expression of emergent properties. In the past year we have (1) studied Reciprocal Autocatalytic Peptide Networks, illustrating how self-reproduction can emerge from a mutually autocatalytic set of chemical reactions; (2) designed and characterized A Parasitic Peptide Network, demonstrating the emergence of the host-parasite relationship among similar molecular species; and (3) continued studies on Chiroselective Peptide Self-Replication to further address the issue of origin of homochirality in terrestrial proteins; (4) designed and characterized nucleic-acid dependant peptide ligation; and (5) established the theoretical modeling and framework as well as the experimental setup and analyses of Molecular Ecosystems and Networks arising from the dynamic interactions and self-organization of multiple catalytic and autocatalytic peptide systems.