BioSystems 61 (2001) 69–78 Origins of life: a route to nanotechnology Stephen J. Sowerby a,b, *, Nils G. Holm a , George B. Petersen b a Department of Geology and Geochemistry, Stockholm Uniersity, SE-106 91 Stockholm, Sweden b Department of Biochemistry, Uniersity of Otago, P.O. Box 56, Dunedin, New Zealand Received 15 January 2001; received in revised form 25 April 2001; accepted 27 April 2001 Abstract The origins of life and nanotechnology are two seemingly disparate areas of scientific investigation. However, the fundamental questions of life’s beginnings and the applied construction of a Drexlerian nanotechnology both share a similar problem; how did and how can self-reproducing molecular machines originate? Here we draw attention to the coincidence between nanotechnology and origins research with particular attention paid to the spontaneous adsorption and scanning tunneling microscopy investigation of purine and pyrimidine bases self-organized into monolayers, adsorbed to the surfaces of crystalline solids. These molecules which encode biological information in nucleic acids, can form supramolecular architectures exhibiting enantiomorphism with the complexity to store and encode putative protobiological information. We conclude that the application of nanotechnology to the investigation of life’s origins, and vice versa, could provide a viable route to an evolution – driven synthetic life. © 2001 Elsevier Science Ireland Ltd. All rights reserved. Keywords: Artificial; Genetic code; Homochirality; Hydrothermal; Prebiotic; RNA world; STM www.elsevier.com/locate/biosystems 1. Introduction The goal of nanotechnology is a self-replicating, programmable architecture capable of atom-by- atom manipulation of both biological and non-bi- ological matter (Drexler, 1987). Much emphasis has been placed on design. Ab initio calculation and empirical simulations have been used to model molecular mechanical architectures (Sohlberg et al., 1997; Cagin et al., 1998) and such structures seem to be within the realms of con- struction (Cummings and Zettl, 2000). However, one of the most powerful design strategies, evolu- tion, has been restricted because evolution re- quires heredity from a parent class and non-lethal mutation in the progeny, features present only in biology and some computational toy models (Langton, 1986). Biotechnology is biologically inspired nanotech- nology. Biological systems excel at atom-by-atom manipulation, are capable of universal computa- tion and self-reproduction and represent the only truly functional nanotechnology (Drexler, 1987). Atomic scale construction and information pro- cessing are mediated on the surfaces of protein and nucleic acid catalysts. These are complex * Corresponding author. Tel.: +46-8-164751; fax: +46-8- 6747897. E-mail address: stephen.sowerby@geo.su.se (S.J. Sowerby). 0303-2647/01/$ - see front matter © 2001 Elsevier Science Ireland Ltd. All rights reserved. PII:S0303-2647(01)00130-7