How can life originate from a lifeless chemical soup? This question has puzzled scientists since Darwin’s ‘Origin of species’.
University of Groningen chemistry professor Sijbren Otto studies ‘chemical evolution‘ to see if self-organization and autocatalysis will provide the answer. His research group previously developed self-replicating molecules — molecules that can make copies of themselves — and have now observed diversification in replicator mutants. They found that if you start with one ancestral set of replicator mutants, a second set will branch off spontaneously. This means that ecological diversity as encountered in biology may well have its roots at the molecular level. The results were published on Jan. 4, 2016, in Nature Chemistry.
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