Abstract:
A number of biopolymers are essential to all forms of life, as we know it. Nucleic acids are responsible for encoding, transmitting and expressing of genetic information. Proteins serve as structural polymers along with lipids and polysaccharides as well as catalysts of metabolic reactions. Origin of life research provides a variety of robust scenarios for the formation and/or delivery of small biological molecules to prebiotic Earth, e.g. amino acids and nucleobases, whereas emergence of biopolymers remains a largely unsolved problem. Production of polymers in general under prebiotically plausible conditions is usually a straight- forward process. The examples of such systems include hydrogen cyanide polymers, proteinoids and tholins. The structure of these polymeric mixtures does not resemble any contemporary biopolymers, however, given the ease of their production, it stands to reason that such polymers performed certain functions at the early stages of chemical evolution!

. My research focuses on one example of such polymeric mixtures, highly branched or dendritic polyesters formed under simulated drying/rehydrating lagoon environment. In my talk I intend to report on the synthesis, structural analysis and exploration of enzyme-mimetic properties of dendritic polyesters.