Abstract
We all understand how to turn a live chicken into a plate of soup. Yet turning this soup back into a live chicken seems impossible. Although the chemicals from the chicken are also present in the soup, the web in which they were connected – the metabolism – has been broken. Once upon a time, life on this earth originated in a kind of primordial soup. From this first life, biological evolution took over, resulting, among other things, in the chicken
This PhD research describes how a simple prebiotic chemical network – the formose reaction – organises itself. At surface-level this looks like a complex soup. Depending on the environment in which this reaction takes place, we can see how different patterns emerge in the underlying reaction network. When we add dynamic patterns to this environment – such as a day and night rhythm – we see how a central circuit controls the access routes to different parts of the network. The organisation of the modern metabolism, which is made up of small reaction networks, thus seems to be reflected in the construction of the formose reaction network. This shows how a continuously changing environment can play an important role in the evolution from a primordial reaction network to the emergence of life. The new findings in this PhD thesis provide an important basis for plotting a scenario for the origin of life on Earth.
