###Engineering the physics of life into CO2 reduction, protometabolic flux and the emergence of genetic information
Project ID: 2228bd1003 (You will need this ID for your application)
Research Theme: Physical Sciences
UCL Lead department: Division of Biosciences
Lead Supervisor: Nick Lane
Project Summary:
The PhD would be part of a large interdisciplinary project on the origins of life, grounded in the physical chemistry of CO2 reduction feeding into a thermodynamically favoured autotrophic protometabolism and the emergence of the genetic code in protocells. We have three main projects that fit squarely within the EPSRC remit, according to the interests of the student. The first will focus on CO2 reduction and carbon-carbon bond formation in bespoke high-pressure microfluidic chips, using freshly precipitated semiconducting Fe(Ni)S barrier separating redox phases to form long-chain alcohols and alkanoic acids. This is an engineering challenge that will develop our current work using laminar flow and H2 gas at moderate pressures (5-10 Bars) to drive vectorial CO2 fixation, which if successful will use the physical chemistry of life as a guide to decarcarbonization. This project will be in collaboration with Prof Nicholas Szita in Biochemical Engineering and Dr Amandine Marechal in Structural and Molecular Biology. The second project will develop a protometabolic flux analysis of thermodynamically favoured primordial metabolism. It will be largely mathematical modelling of autocatalytic loops and kinetic barriers to flux in the absence of genes, but will work alongside prebiotic chemists testing specific predicted bottlenecks in flux. The third project will develop our current molecular dynamic framework on the origins of the genetic code, using multiple force fields (including quantum modelling) to simulate the biophysical interactions between amino acids and short RNA aptamers that are predicted to give rise to the rudimentary genetic code. The predicted relationships will be tested using NMR in collaboration with Prof John Christodoulou in Biosciences. All three projects will draw on the expertise of a network of researchers across three faculties at UCL and a strong group of post-doctoral research fellows and other PhD students (funded by a BBSRC sLoLa grant).