SYSTEMS CHEMISTRY: EMERGENCE OF OSCILLATORY AND BISTABLE BEHAVIOR IN SYNTHETIC NETWORKS
Living organisms and individual cells function far from equilibrium, at times exhibiting steady-state behavior, and always interacting with their environment by importing nutrients and energy and exporting waste products and heat. Like other open systems in nature, living organisms are replete with multistable and oscillatory behavior at all levels, to the extent that these functions have been termed as a defining attribute of life. Recently, we have started to investigate an important challenge in contemporary Systems Chemistry, that is, to synthetically construct “bottom-up” molecular networks that display such complex behavior. Towards this aim, we have utilized catalytic replication networks, since these entities have already served to study emergent phenomena in complex mixtures. In first part of this talk, we will describe the kinetic behavior of small networks of coupled oscillators, producing various functions such as logic gates, integrators, counters, triggers and detectors. These networks are also utilized to simulate the connectivity and network topology observed for the Kai proteins circadian clocks from the S. elongatus cyanobacteria, thus producing rhythms whose constant frequency is independent of the input intake rate and robust towards concentration fluctuations.1-2 Then, in the second part, we will disclose our experimental results, showing for the first time that the replication process can also lead to bistability in product equilibrium distribution.3 We believe that these recent studies may help further reveal the origin and underlying principles of complex enzymatic processes in cells.
1. N. Wagner, S. Alasibi, E. Peacock-Lopez, G. Ashkenasy J. Phys. Chem. Lett. 2015, 6, 60-65.
2. L. Gurevich, R. Cohen-Luria, N. Wagner, G. Ashkenasy Chem. Comm. 2015, 51, 5672-5675.
3. R. Mukherjee, R. Cohen-Luria, N. Wagner, G. Ashkenasy Angew. Chem. Int. Ed. 2015, 54, 12452 –12456.
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