Nicholas Hud of Georgia Institute of Technology, Jean-Marie Dimandja of Spelman College, Jerzy Leszczynski of Jackson State Univeristy, David Lynn of Emory University and Thomas Orlando of Georgia Tech are supported by an award from the Chemical Bonding Centers (CBC) for a Phase I program to carry out research on the chemical origin of life. The project is based on the theory that life evolved from prebiotic precursors that spontaneously assembled into RNA-like polymers. Questions that are being addressed include: What molecules were potentially present in the prebiotic chemical inventory? What molecules can self-assemble to form RNA-like polymers? And what molecules could have acted as prebiotic catalysts for the formation or assembly of other molecules? There are three principal objectives of the CBC: (i) to determine the potential building blocks of RNA-like polymers and to understand the reactions which form them; (ii) to uncover possible early metabolisms and mechanisms of self-assembly that could have selectively produced and coupled these building blocks into more complex molecules, eventually leading to RNA-like polymers; and (iii) to develop a distributed, cyber-enabled approach to advancing our knowledge of model prebiotic chemical reactions that will involve undergraduate students and their local mentors.
The work is having a broad impact in a number of ways: through the participation of women and under-represented minorities, particularly through the HBCU partner institutions of Spelman and Jackson State University; through the development of a high school outreach program that is making prebiotic experiments accessible to high school chemistry teachers; by further developing an existing course on "Chemistry of the Origin of Life" and through a research seminar series for freshmen on the "Origins of Order"; and through plans to disseminate information about the center through radio, local public television, computer graphics, and web-based educational modules.
