Publications by authors named "Thomas Matreux"

Article Synopsis
  • Biopolymer building blocks are essential for the origins of life, but their formation typically requires rare feedstocks and complex purification processes.
  • A new study suggests that heat flow through thin geological cracks can effectively separate over 50 prebiotically relevant compounds from complex mixtures, enhancing their concentration.
  • The method significantly boosts reaction yields, as shown by the increased dimerization of glycine when trimetaphosphate is selectively purified, highlighting the potential role of geological processes in prebiotic chemistry.
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Life is based on informational polymers such as DNA or RNA. For their polymerization, high concentrations of complex monomer building blocks are required. Therefore, the dilution by diffusion poses a major problem before early life could establish a non-equilibrium of compartmentalization.

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Microbial fossils preserved by early diagenetic chert provide a window into the Proterozoic biosphere, but seawater chemistry, microbial processes, and the interactions between microbes and the environment that contributed to this preservation are not well constrained. Here, we use fossilization experiments to explore the processes that preserve marine cyanobacterial biofilms by the precipitation of amorphous silica in a seawater medium that is analogous to Proterozoic seawater. These experiments demonstrate that the exceptional silicification of benthic marine cyanobacteria analogous to the oldest diagnostic cyanobacterial fossils requires interactions among extracellular polymeric substances (EPS), photosynthetically induced pH changes, magnesium cations (Mg ), and >70 ppm silica.

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We study the effect of introducing altruistic agents in a Schelling-like model of residential segregation. We find that even an infinitesimal proportion of altruists has dramatic catalytic effects on the collective utility of the system. Altruists provide pathways that move the system away from the suboptimal equilibrium it would reach if the system included only egoist agents, allowing it to reach the optimal steady state.

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