Metabolism, information, and viability in a simulated physically-plausible protocell

Critical experimental design issues connecting energy transduction and inheritable information within a protocell are explored and elucidated. The protocell design utilizes a photo-driven energy transducer (a ruthenium complex) to turn resource molecules into building blocks, in a manner that is modulated by a combinatorial DNA-based co-factor. This co-factor molecule serves as part of an electron relay for the energy transduction mechanism, where the charge-transport rates depend on the sequence that contains an oxo-guanine. The co-factor also acts as a store of inheritable information due to its ability to replicate non-enzymatically through template-directed ligation. Together, the energy transducer and the co-factor act as a metabolic catalyst that produces co-factor DNA building blocks as well as fatty acids (from picolinium ester and modified DNA oligomers), where the fatty acids self-assemble into vesicles on which exterior surface both the co-factor (DNA) and the energy transducer are anchored with hydrophobic tails. Here we use simulations to study how the co-factor sequence determines its fitness as reflected by charge transfer and replication rates. To estimate the impact on the protocell, we compare these rates with previously measured metabolic rates from a similar system where the charge transfer is directly between the ruthenium complex and the oxo-guanine (without DNA replication and charge transport). Replication and charge transport turn out to have different and often opposing sequence requirements. Functional information of the co-factor molecules is used to probe the feasibility of randomly picking co-factor sequences from a limited population of co-factors molecules, where a good co-factor can enhance both metabolic biomass production and its own replication rate.