Category: Uncategorized

AFFINITY GAME. "Many chemicals are valuable because they bind to other molecules. Chemical theory cannot directly design “binders.” However, we might recreate in the laboratory the Darwinian processes that nature uses to create binders." https://lnkd.in/dX4ydjX View in LinkedIn

MOLECULAR EVOLUTION. "Molecules crafted in the laboratory can make copies of themselves, "Mutate", compete for resources and assemble, giving a paradigm for life." https://lnkd.in/djCifdK View in LinkedIn

IRREVERSIBILITY AND ENTROPY. "From the standpoint of physics, this observation contains an intriguing hint of how the properties of self-replicators must be constrained by thermodynamic laws, which dictate that irreversibility is always accompanied by an increase of entropy." http://aip.scitation.org/doi/full/10.1063/1.4818538 View in LinkedIn

THERMAL FORWARD REACTIONS. "Every species of living thing can make a copy of itself by exchanging energy and matter with its surroundings. One feature common to all such examples of spontaneous “self-replication” is their statistical irreversibility: clearly, it is much more likely that one bacterium should turn into two than that two should somehow spontaneously revert back into one." http://aip.scitation.org/doi/full/10.1063/1.4818538 View in LinkedIn

ENERGY FINDINGS. "We find that the minimum value for the physically allowed rate of heat production is determined by the growth rate, internal entropy, and durability of the replicator." http://aip.scitation.org/doi/full/10.1063/1.4818538 View in LinkedIn

REPLICATION ENERGY. "Here, we undertake to make this intuition rigorous and quantitative by deriving a lower bound for the amount of heat that is produced during a process of self-replication in a system coupled to a thermal bath." http://aip.scitation.org/doi/full/10.1063/1.4818538 View in LinkedIn

SIGNIFICANCE OF XDNA. "Scientists have created artificial genetic material that can store information and evolve over generations in a similar way to DNA - a feat expected to drive research in medicine and biotechnology, and shed light on how molecules first replicated and assembled into life billions of years ago. Ultimately, the creation of alternatives to DNA could enable scientists to make novel forms of life in the laboratory." https://lnkd.in/dcUY9Jt View in LinkedIn

IMPROVING DNA. "Axiomatically, the density of information stored in DNA, with just four nucleotides (GACT), is higher than in a binary code, but less than it might be if synthetic biologists succeed in adding independently replicating nucleotides to genetic systems." https://lnkd.in/dinaF2C View in LinkedIn

"SYNTHETIC XENO DNA (XDNA, foreign DNA) is made by synthetic biologists from the Cambridge MRC Unit to function like DNA. A host of alternative nucleic acids have been made in labs over the years, but no one has made them work like DNA. Now that has been cracked. It is a twisted ladder with a backbone not of phosphates and sugars but cyclohexane and threose, and they engineered polymerase enzymes to work with XDNA to translate DNA to XDNA and back again as an evolving genetic system. It would also serve as a failsafe for escaped GMOs, and make new life forms." https://lnkd.in/dYQeS-P View in LinkedIn

"GENETIC SELECTION is a potentially general method for evolving the properties of these first-generation molecules." https://lnkd.in/dEx4mGb View in LinkedIn