ISMB99
The Origin of Biological Information

Manfred Eigen

Max-Planck-lnstitut für biophysikalische Chemie
D-37077 Göttingen,
Germany,


What is the distinguishing feature of a living system that singularizes it from every non-living chemical ensemble. regardless of the extent of the complexity. The differentiable characteristic of the living system is information. Information assures the controlled reproduction of all the constituents thereby ensuring the conservation of viability. Information - unlike energy - is not subject to a conservation law. Hence the fundamental question behind the origin of life is: How can information originate?

Information theory, which was pioneered by Claude Shannon, cannot answer this question this theory is most successful in dealing with problems of coding and transmission. In principle, the answer was formulated 130 years ago by Charles Darwin: The information that is unique for life evolves by virtue of natural selection. Today we can be more specific: Natural selection is a non-equilibrium process. It is an inherent consequence of mutagenous self-replication at several levels of organization: for instance it is evident in molecules such as nucleic acids, in molecular complexes such as viruses and in autonomous formes of life such as micro- or higher organisms. New physical concepts have been introduced in order to deal quantitatively with the dynamics of the molecular generation of genetic information. They provide a physical foundation for Darwinian behaviour, yet they introduce major modifications in its interpretation. The lecture deals with these physical concepts, such as "sequence space", "quasi-species" and "hypercycles" and will scrutinize their adequacy for rationalizing experimental results obtained with molecular model systems and with viruses under natural conditions. Elucidating the principles of molecular self-organization has made possible to construct automated machines that make it possible for genetic information to evolve under controlled conditions in an abridged time scale.

References

  1. Eigen, M., McCaskill, J. and Schuster, P. (1988), Molecular quasispecies, J. Phys. Chem., 92, 6881-6891
  2. Eigen, M., McCaskill, J. and Schuster P. (1989), The molecular Quasi-species, Adv. Chem. Phys., 75, 149-263
  3. Leuthäusser, l. (1986), An exact correspondence between Eigen's evolution model and a two-dimensional Ising system, Chem. Phys., 84, 1884-1885
  4. Eigen, M. (1993), The origin of genetic information: viruses as models, Gene. 135, 37-47
  5. Eigen, M. and Nieselt-Struwe, K. (1991), How old is the immunodeficiency virus?, AIDS, 5, 585-593
  6. Eigen, M. and Gardiner, W.C. (1984), Evolutionary molecular engineering based on RNA replication, Pure Appl. Chem., 56, 967968
  7. Eigen, M., Biebricher, C.K., Gebinoga, M. and Gardiner, W.C. (1991), The Hypercycle - Coupling of RNA and Protein Biosynthesis in the Infection Cycle of an RNA-Bacteriophage, Biochemistry, 30, 11005-11018
  8. Brakmann, S. and Eigen, M. (1996), Evolution in the Test Tube, "Frontiers in Biology", Vol. 1 (eds. W. Gilbert and G. Tocchini, Valentini) submitted
  9. Eigen, M. and Rigler, R. (1994), Sorting single molecules: Application to diagnostics and evolutionary biotechnology, Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. USA, 91, 5740-5747
  10. Oehlenschläger, F., Schwille, P. and Eigen, M. (1996), Detection of HIV-1 RNA by nucleic acid sequence-based amplification combined with fluorescence correlation spectroscopy, Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci., USA, 93

 

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