H2020Индивидуална стипендия2020–2022

SRCV · Molecular Device for Optical Monitoring of Self-Replication in Compartments

„Хоризонт 2020“ — Действия „Мария Склодовска-Кюри“

Период: 2020-04-01 → 2022-03-31
Финансиране от ЕС: 187 572 €
Участници: 1
Схема: MSCA-IF-EF-ST

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Накратко на български

Специален флуоресцентен сензор следи в реално време как пептидни молекули се самовъзпроизвеждат, като разпознава разлики в техния размер и състав. Това помага за по-доброто разбиране на процесите при възникването и еволюцията на живота.

Този кратък обзор е генериран от изкуствен интелект

Кратко обяснение, генерирано от езиков модел по текста на CORDIS. Оригиналът е по-долу.

Резултати накратко

Molecular Device for Optical Monitoring of Self-Replication in Compartments

Self-replicating systems play an important role in research on the synthesis and origin of life. Monitoring of these systems has mostly relied on techniques such as NMR or chromatography, which are limited in throughput and demanding when monitoring replication in real time. To circumvent these problems, We have demonstrated the use of a pattern-generating fluorescent molecular probe for straightforwardly detecting, discriminating between, and real-time tracking of peptide-based self-replicators. In systems dominated by a single replicator the sensor is able to discriminate between replicators with different macrocycles sizes (e.g. hexamers, octamers, pentamers) and amino-acid composition. It is also able to differentiate macrocycles with the same size but subtly different peptide sequences. Furthermore, the conversion of building block into replicator could be monitored qualitatively in situ and in real time without interfering with the replication process. The probe was also found to respond differently to different aggregates formed by the building block and the replicator precursors, indicating that its discriminating ability extends beyond the fibrous aggregates for which it was designed. This new technology for the optical analysis of self-replicating systems opens the door for continuous monitoring of parallel experiments in high-throughput ways in small volumes (i.e. in microdroplets or other protocell environments), enabling, for example, the study of stochastic effects, which may prove important in the emergence and evolution of new forms of life.

Текст от CORDIS, на английски · Данни: CORDIS, © Европейски съюз

Цел на проекта

Unravelling the origin of life and achieving the de-novo synthesis of life are among the grand challenges in contemporary science. Self-replicating molecules play a central role in addressing these challenges. Progress in the field of self-replication is hampered by limitations in monitoring the replication process in real-time, particularly when using low concentrations and small sample volumes (i.e. in protocell environments). Here we propose to employ, for the first time, a new optical pattern-generating combinatorial fluorescent molecular device (expertise of the Experienced Researcher) for the real-time monitoring of the dynamic evolution of self-replicating molecules (expertise of the Host Lab). The binding of the sensor to the self-replicators affects the intensity and/or position of the bands of each of the chromophores contained in the sensor at different emission channels, thus generating a unique optical fingerprint (fluorescent pattern) for each self-replicator. The method allows optical identification and tracking of self-replicators in real-time and requires only small sample volumes. The latter characteristic allows self-replication to be monitored inside cell-like compartments (coascervate droplet or bilayer vesicles), enabling, for the first time, to study replication inside such compartments. Merging replication with compartmentalization constitute an important towards developing a minimal form of life. Furthermore, compartmentalization in small volumes allows large numbers of experiments to be conducted in parallel, which would, for the first time, enable studying stochastic effects important for evolution of synthetic self-replicators.

Оригинален текст от CORDIS (на английски).

Участници

RIJKSUNIVERSITEIT GRONINGEN · GroningenКоординаторНидерландия