Robot chemist offers insight into the origins of life:

[beecee]

https://phys.org/news/2021-06-robot-chemist-insight-life.html

Robot chemist offers insight into the origins of life:

A robotic 'evolution machine' capable of exploring the generational development of chemical mixtures over long periods of time could help cast new light on the origins of life, scientists say.

 team of chemists from the University of Glasgow developed the robot, which uses a machine-learning algorithm to make decisions about which chemicals from a selection of 18 to combine in a reactor, and how to set conditions under which the reaction occurs. The robot is capable of running the experiments on its own, with minimal human supervision.

The process aims to provide new insight into how Earth's complex organic life developed from its simple, non-living chemical origins by allowing the machine to run experiments over the course of several weeks.

Measuring the mass index of the product of each experiment teaches the robot something new about the complexity of molecule produced by each reaction. That information helps it learn how to vary the experiment to create a more complex molecule in subsequent reactions—a digital version, the team hopes, of the natural selection for complexity which gave rise to organic life.

moe at link................

the paper:

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-021-23828-z

A robotic prebiotic chemist probes long term reactions of complexifying mixtures:

 

Abstract:

To experimentally test hypotheses about the emergence of living systems from abiotic chemistry, researchers need to be able to run intelligent, automated, and long-term experiments to explore chemical space. Here we report a robotic prebiotic chemist equipped with an automatic sensor system designed for long-term chemical experiments exploring unconstrained multicomponent reactions, which can run autonomously over long periods. The system collects mass spectrometry data from over 10 experiments, with 60 to 150 algorithmically controlled cycles per experiment, running continuously for over 4 weeks. We show that the robot can discover the production of high complexity molecules from simple precursors, as well as deal with the vast amount of data produced by a recursive and unconstrained experiment. This approach represents what we believe to be a necessary step towards the design of new types of Origin of Life experiments that allow testable hypotheses for the emergence of life from prebiotic chemistry.