David Lacoste

Research·01 / 06

Origin of life

How did chemistry become biology? I study the physical principles that allow populations of molecules to replicate, compete and organise themselves before the first cells existed.

Transient compartmentalization · Autocatalysis · Homochirality

Transient compartmentalization

Early replicators had to cope with parasites, dilution and errors. Cycles in which molecules are repeatedly encapsulated in small compartments, grown, selected and pooled again provide a simple and generic way to purify functional replicators. With collaborators, we developed a theory of this transient compartmentalization dynamics, derived the associated error threshold, and recently showed with experiments on RNA replicators that the composition of earlier compartments leaves a lasting memory in the system.

Autocatalysis and chemical reaction networks

Autocatalysis is the property of a set of molecules to produce more of itself, and it is a hallmark of living systems. We classified the minimal autocatalytic motifs in chemical reaction networks, characterised the stoichiometric and topological constraints that limit their growth rate and their flux, and studied the stability of such networks in a linear framework.

Homochirality

Living matter uses only one handedness of amino acids and sugars. We showed that a transition to homochirality is a robust, generic feature of large chemical networks with many species, and studied how it can emerge through template-directed ligation in an RNA reactor.

Publications 12

All publications

Transient compartmentalization

Autocatalysis and chemical reaction networks

Homochirality