Abstract:
The origin of life on earth involves both rather fundamental generic issues and the elucidation of the specific course of events. Much of our current thinking is guided by extant biochemical architectures projected into reconstructed prebiotic geochemical environments. There are however a set of rather generic problems, beyond chemical reaction mechanisms, that need to be solved at the origin of life, and that might be investigated experimentally if we had an appropriate platform. In the talk I will present a candidate platform developed in the EU MICREAgents project for programmable autonomous microparticle chemistry, explaining how far we are currently towards complete implementation and showing some of the ways in which the platform might be utilized to explore generic origin of life issues such as the bootstrapping of information coding.