Computational Models of Polymer Synthesis Driven by Dehydration/Rehydration Cycles: Repurination in Simulated Hydrothermal Fields
Engineering
Independent Research With Professor
Of all the questions that science can potentially answer, one of the largest is "how did life come to be?". On the road to answering this question about the origin of life, the scientific community has been split in two. Once community believes that life began at the bottom of the ocean in and around deep-sea hydrothermal vents. Recently, however, many scientists have argued that the laws of thermodynamics make the the chemical reactions necessary to develop life in the deep-sea impossible. As a result, Professor David Deamer and Bruce Damer at UC Santa Cruz have developed a competing hypothesis which relies on wet and dry cycles which occur in and around terrestrial hydrothermal pools. This "wet-dry cycling" hypothesis has gained serious traction as Professors Damer and Deamer have shown experimentally that RNA can be synthesized by placing asteroid dust on the edges of hydrothermal pools such as those found at Yellowstone National Park. It should be noted that it is widely accepted (via the "RNA world hypothesis) that RNA is one of, if not the first, biochemical necessary for life. While Professors Damer and Deamer have produced extremely convincing experimental work, the mathematical theory and computational modeling of the chemical reactions in these hydrothermal pools has been largely undeveloped. To his end, we created a mathematical model which was later translated into code. Before this model had been developed, on three chemical reactions in these hydrothermal pools were known. When only these three chemical reactions are accounted for, the model does not match with experimental data. However, upon the addition of a fourth, previously unknown chemical reaction (which we named repurination), the model matches precisely to experimental data. As such, the model has allowed us to predict the existence of repurination, a prediction which has since been corroborated by a lab at Stanford University.
