H2020Индивидуална стипендия2020–2022

POLINFO · Information encoding to polymers

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

Период: 2020-05-01 → 2022-04-30
Финансиране от ЕС: 184 708 €
Участници: 1
Схема: MSCA-IF

Линиите свързват координатора с партньорите.

Накратко на български

Физичните принципи при създаването на подредени полимери, като ДНК, се анализират чрез теоретични модели. Това помага да се разбере произходът на живота и да се подобрят органичните материали за съхранение на големи обеми от данни.

Този кратък обзор е генериран от изкуствен интелект

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

Резултати накратко

Information encoding to polymers

The pertinence of information management in cells extends in many directions. One of the fundamental scientific questions is that of the origin of life, which remains elusive. How did life emerge from a soup of simple organic molecules swimming in the vastness of pre-biotic oceans? The famous Miller experiment from 1950s has shown that the protein building blocks, amino-acids, can be synthesized from a mixture of organic molecules under pre-biotic conditions. No equivalent experiments has been performed for the formation of nucleotides, shedding doubt as to what the first informational polymer might be. Lately, the formation of informational polymers has taken an important role in the field of information storage to polymers. Current explosion in data acquisition and mining is one of the most influential technological advances today. Since data production is increasing exponentially, there is a need to establish alternative data storage materials in the following decade, with organic polymers, among them DNA, presenting a relevant option due to its high information density and storage energy efficiency. Currently, chains of no more than 300 subunits can be synthesized, limiting the encoding capacity of these short chains. Consequently, devising new principles that would help in the formation of informational polymers, be it organic or DNA polymers, would be of immense help for the field. Our goal was to better understand how the formation of ordered polymers could be improved from the perspective of Physics. We use toy models to represent the formation of ordered polymers, and we aim to determine non-equilibrium conditions that would favor spontaneous ordering of sequences, which would potentially have consequences on the field of origin of life and ordered polymer synthesis.

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

Цел на проекта

Data acquisition and mining is currently the principal driving force of technological advances. Massive expansion of the field requires implementation of new solutions in data storing and retrieving, where targeted solutions need not only be resource-sustainable and recyclable, but also have to posses high information-encoding density to decrease space allocated for storage. Polymers represent natural candidates for the task, as nucleic acids already efficiently encode for vast biological complexity. However, the synthesis of long sequence-ordered polymers in vitro has proven to be challenging and remains an open question. Our project aims to address whether conditions of spontaneous sequence ordering can be achieved under non-equilibrium conditions. To that extent, we build a computational model that bridges a coarse-grained representation of polymer with stochastic kinetics modelling of polymerization and depolymerization reaction. The model is a novel approach to exploring information encoding to polymers, as it is not limited by master equation solution feasibility, and allows, for the first time, to interpret the informational content of the generated sequence through its effect on polymer structure. We explore novel theoretical ideas on non-equilibrium systems that have recently emerged, suggesting that spontaneous ordering of systems takes the path of maximum heat dissipation, which we plan to test for the first time in the context of information generation. In addition, we aim to understand the timescales pertinent to sequence ordering under non-equilibrium conditions, where specifically the concentration number of monomer types is varied in time. Finally, we wish to understand the conditions which allow for creation of autocatalytic self-replicative sequence sets, with emphasis on timescales relevant to this process. Overall, we aim to identify timescales pertinent to generation of ordered sequences, which could pave way to new experimental strategies.

Оригинален текст от CORDIS (на английски).

Участници

CENTRE NATIONAL DE LA RECHERCHE SCIENTIFIQUE CNRS · ParisКоординаторФранция