APS March Meeting 2022
Volume 67, Number 3
Monday–Friday, March 14–18, 2022;
Chicago
Session A14: Nonequilibrium Statistical Physics Models of the Origins of Life
8:00 AM–11:00 AM,
Monday, March 14, 2022
Room: McCormick Place W-183B
Sponsoring
Unit:
DBIO
Chair: Sergei Maslov, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Abstract: A14.00004 : Towards a Statistical Mechanics of Biochemistry
9:48 AM–10:24 AM
Abstract
Presenter:
Sara Walker
(Arizona State University)
Author:
Sara Walker
(Arizona State University)
Life on Earth is unified by its use of a shared set of component chemical compounds and reactions, providing a detailed model for universal biochemistry. This notion of universality is specific to known biochemistry and does not allow quantitative predictions about examples not yet observed. It is also quite different from universality in other fields of research. For example, in statistical physics, universality describes properties or macroscopic features observed across large classes of systems irrespective of the details of any one system. Universality classes are apparent in certain limits where common patterns emerge in the statistics of large numbers of interacting component parts, allowing predictions to be made guiding the search for new examples, as in materials discovery. If biochemistries could be shown to be representative of universality classes in the physical sense, a mechanistic understanding of the identified scaling exponents could have important implications for informing models of new examples of life. Here I introduce a more generalizable concept of biochemical universality, akin to the kind found in physics. Starting from an ensemble of annotated genomic data including 11955 metagenomes, 1282 archaea, 11759 bacteria and 200 eukaryotic taxa, we show universality classes in enzyme functions (Gagler et al., In press 2022), universality in network topology across levels of organization (Kim et al., 2019) and in elemental use and chiral properties of molecules used in biochemical networks (Vergeli et al. In prep, and Kim et al. In prep). These results establish the existence of biochemical universality classes that do not depend strictly on the details of known life's chemistry, with implications for guiding our search for missing biochemical diversity on Earth, or for biochemistries that might deviate from the exact chemical make-up of life-as-we-know-it, such as at the origins of life, in alien environments, or in the design of synthetic life.