Nikita, Mathieu, Lía and Wilhelm together with Max Derks from Laboratory of Spectroscopy and Catalysis and Labmate published a new paper on enzyme-based computation! They used proteolytic enzymatic networks immobilised in hydrogel beads and compartmentalised in a CSTR as a novel platform for molecular information processing. They demonstrated robustness of the platform in performing the fundamental arithmetic operations of addition, subtraction and multiplication. This analogue logic approach goes beyond the Boolean gates and has potential applications in future bioelectronic devices. The concept of analogue logic helps to generalize our understanding of computation in catalytic networks.Congratulations!!

You can find the paper here.

In collaboration with researchers at the J. Craig Venter Institute, University of Minnesota, and Santa Fe Institute, we published a paper describing 2 years of attempts to derive a cell-free expression (CFE) system based on Mycoplasma bacterium. What seemed to be a simple and straightforward project, turned out to be challenging due to unique features of Mycoplasma biology. As a parasite of mammals, mycoplasmas evolved to scavenge its surrounding environment for nutrients. Therefore, surface nucleases are essential for survival. For producing lysates, such nucleases degraded important nucleic acids (e.g. ribosomal RNA), which prevented in vitro transcription-translation reactions.  A series of new methods were designed for testing the quality of lysates and for producing lysates with lower nuclease activity.”

You can find the new article here.

Congratulations Andrei, Wilhelm and all collaborators!

Four billion years ago, Life emerged from the prebiotic environment. We know many building blocks required for Life may have been present at this point. However, Life is more than the sum of its components. These collections of chemical building blocks had to work together to create Life using only information from their environment and their reactivity. Understanding this phenomenon, ‘self-organization’,is a key piece of the puzzle in understanding the Origin of Life. Our latest work published in Nature Chemistry offers a first glimpse of how patterns in chemical reactivity and the environment can come together to organise systems of chemical reactions.

You can read our work here: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41557-022-00956-7
(public view-only version: https://rdcu.be/cO4qW)

Congratulations Will, Lena, Peer, Thijs and Wilhelm!

At the Origins of Life, the transfer of scarce phosphate to the organic molecules that make up biochemistry is a significant challenge for prebiotic chemistry. Here we show a prebiotic physicochemical cycle to activate orthophosphate and via a kinetically stable thermodynamically activated molecule phosphorylate all of Life’s basic building blocks. Excitingly, this system is constructed along the same principles by which Life transfers phosphate within cells. We are very grateful to the Simons Collaboration on the Origins of Life for supporting this research.

 

The paper is here: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-021-25555-x

 

You can read a summary of the paper here:

https://twitter.com/oliver_maguire/status/1438836473973952515