This article is part of the supplement: 5th German Conference on Cheminformatics: 23. CIC-Workshop
Oral presentation
Systems chemistry: from chemical self-replication to trisoligo-based nanoconstruction
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Correspondence: Günter von Kiedrowski kiedro@rub.de
Lehrstuhl für Organische Chemie I - Bioorganische Chemie, Ruhr-Universität, Universitätsstrasse 150, 44780 Bochum, Germany
Journal of Cheminformatics 2010, 2(Suppl 1):O1 doi:10.1186/1758-2946-2-S1-O1
Published: 4 May 2010First paragraph (this article has no abstract)
Self-replication is one of the major principles without life could not exist. The emergence of self-replicating systems on the early earth is generally believed to have taken place before the advent of instructed protein synthesis based on a complex translation machinery. Whether the origin of self-replication is identical to the origin of the hypothetical RNA world or whether it existed at an earlier stage of evolution is an open question that has stimulated chemists to search for chemical systems capable of making copies of itselves via autocatalytic reactions. As self-replication means autocatalysis plus information transfer, the reaction products must necessarily be able to store more structural information than their precursors. Templating as a means to transfer structural information has been exploited since the first successful example of a chemical self-replicating system almost two decades ago [1]. Today we have a broad variety of such systems employing oligonucleotides, peptides, and small organic molecules as templates and autocatalytic [1-3], cross-catalytic [4], collectively autocatalytic and non-autonomous (stepwise) schemes of self-replication [5].