In Genetic Takeover and the Mineral Origins of Life (1982),1 Cairns-Smith (CS) proposed that crystals, particularly clay minerals, were the first genes in ‘living organisms’ and that their function was later ‘transferred’ to more familiar biopolymers. The primary requirement for reproduction under the conditions of natural selection is the retention of specific information over long periods of time through repeated copies. CS envisioned a means for replication through crystal growth, with the information being stored in patterns of crystal defects. The mutual disposition of the mistakes is then transferred from one crystal to another via fragmentation and epitaxy. The idea of ‘crystals-as-genes’ is attractive because it reduces information storage to materials that, unlike RNA and DNA, were undoubtedly abundant on the pre-biotic earth.

CS’s ideas have captured a place in the origin of life community and are widely cited, but acknowledgments of their virtues are always accompanied by the caveat that they lack verification by experiment. We present a plan to give an experimental foundation to the notion of defected crystals as pre-biotic genes, rescuing CS’s imaginative crystals-as-genes proposal from the limbo of uninvestigated hypotheses. We aim to determine whether information contained in the spatial disposition of screw dislocations in a model crystal system, potassium hydrogen phthalate, can be transferred from one crystal to another. A key to this work is our ability to label crystal defects with organic luminophores, a skill that is an outgrowth of our long-standing study of dyeing crystals.2 Moreover, we will attempt to transfer the information content of the spatial disposition of growth defects into patterns of luminescence from nucleotides that form mixed crystals with our model host. This represents the ‘takeover’ stage whereby crystals transfer their genetic function to biopolymers.

Vortragssprache: englisch