Science AMA Series: I’m Sijbren Otto, professor of Systems Chemistry. Today we would like to talk with you about complex mixtures at the interface between chemistry and biology and how far we have progressed towards making life in a test tube! AMA!

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Hey Reddit! I am Sijbren Otto, joined today by Gaël Schaeffer (postdoc), Andreas Hussain and Jim Ottelé (PhD students) to discuss systems chemistry[1] and synthetic life. You can find a video describing our research here!

Back in 2010 we reported a system where self-replicating molecules spontaneously emerge from a complex mixture, via an growth breakage mechanism.[2,3] A few years later, we discovered another system using the same concepts, but where mutations lead to the consecutive emergence of two ‘species’ of replicators, one being the ancestor of the previous one, thus mimicking an important process in biological evolution.[4] This work received a fair amount of attention from the media and from you guys on reddit.

Our next challenges are the incorporation of more biological features into artificial systems, such as adaptation, Darwinian evolution or metabolism and compartmentalisation, in order to one day make a chemical system that captures all the essential elements of life!

For more information, visit our group website here or our list of publications here. We are very happy to answer any and all questions relating to this topic.

We will be back at 11 am ET to answer your questions, Ask us anything!

[1] J. Li, P. Nowak, S. Otto, J. Am. Chem. Soc. 2013, 135, 9222-9239.

[2] J. M. Carnall, C. A. Waudby, A. M. Belenguer, M. C. Stuart, J. J. Peyralans, S. Otto, Science 2010, 327, 1502-1506.

[3] M. Colomb-Delsuc, E. Mattia, J. W. Sadownik, S. Otto, Nat. Commun. 2015, 6, 7427-7433.

[4] J. W. Sadownik, E. Mattia, P. Nowak, S. Otto, Nat. Chem. 2016, 8, 264-269.

">Science AMA Series: I’m Sijbren Otto, professor of Systems Chemistry. Today we would like to talk with you about complex mixtures at the interface between chemistry and biology and how far we have progressed towards making life in a test tube! AMA!