CHEMIFY FOUNDER ESTABLISHES NEW "ASSEMBLY THEORY" UNIFYING PHYSICS AND BIOLOGY TO EXPLAIN EVOLUTION AND COMPLEXITY
Chemify founder and CEO, Lee Cronin, and an international team of researchers has developed a new theoretical framework that bridges physics and biology to provide a unified approach for understanding how complexity and evolution emerge in nature. This new work on "Assembly Theory," published today in Nature, represents a major advance in our fundamental comprehension of biological evolution and how it is governed by the physical laws of the universe.
The researchers demonstrated how Assembly Theory can be applied to quantify selection and evolution in systems ranging from simple molecules to complex polymers and cellular structures. It explains both the discovery of new objects and the selection of existing ones, allowing open-ended increases in complexity characteristic of life and technology. “Assembly theory not only has implications for the origin of life, but the design of new drugs, materials and understanding how evolution can be used to operate in chemistry to create new function.” said Lee Cronin.
This research builds on the team's previous work developing Assembly Theory as an empirically validated approach to life detection, with implications for the search for alien life and efforts to evolve new life forms in the laboratory. In prior work, the team assigned a complexity score to molecules called the molecular assembly index, based on the minimal number of bond-forming steps required to build a molecule. They showed how this index is experimentally measurable and how high values correlate with life-derived molecules.
The new study introduces mathematical formalism around a physical quantity called "Assembly" that captures how much selection is required to produce a given set of complex objects, based on their abundance and assembly indices.
The researchers aim to further refine Assembly Theory and explore its applications for characterizing known and unknown life, and testing hypotheses about how life emerges from non-living matter. A key feature of the theory is that it is experimentally testable and can be used to design new molecules with interesting new properties.