Faculty of Science, Technology and Medicine
Faculty of Law, Economics and Finance
Faculty of Humanities, Education and Social Sciences
Interdisciplinary Centre for Security, Reliability and Trust
Luxembourg Centre for Systems Biomedicine
Luxembourg Centre for Contemporary and Digital History
Luxembourg Centre for European Law
Luxembourg Centre for Socio-Environmental Systems
How did lifeless matter organise itself into something as complex as a living cell? Every civilisation has tried to answer these questions through myth, philosophy, and religion. Today, Prof. Massimiliano Esposito is pursuing them through physics and chemistry and has been awarded one of Europe’s most prestigious research grants, the ERC Advanced Grant, for his project “Energy and Self-Organisation in Systems Chemistry: Building the Missing Theory.”
The chemistry of life
At the heart of Prof. Esposito’s research is a deceptively simple idea: living systems are, at their core, networks of chemical reactions. Every heartbeat, every thought, every cell division is the result of molecules reacting, transforming, and exchanging energy. But how did chemical systems acquire the ability to self-organise and develop the properties we associate with life?
Genetics has shown that all life on earth descends from a single ancient organism, known as the Last Universal Common Ancestor (LUCA), which lived roughly four billion years ago. LUCA was already a sophisticated organism, implying that a long period of chemical evolution must have preceded it. How chemical systems gradually acquired the hallmarks of living systems remains one of science’s greatest unanswered questions.
Prof. Esposito’s approach centres on energy. He aims to uncover the physical principles governing chemical systems that are continuously supplied with energy. Most matter, left alone, drifts toward equilibrium: think of a fire burning out, or a hot cup of coffee going cold. Living systems do the opposite. They continuously consume energy to stay organised and active. Your body, for instance, constantly burns energy to maintain the self-regulating state we call being alive.
The question is: what are the fundamental principles that enable lifelike behaviour to emerge from chemistry? Answering it could provide the theoretical foundations needed to design increasingly life-like synthetic chemical systems.
Toward a theory designing molecular machines
Such results could help scientists increase the sophistication of molecular systems, tiny machines that consume energy, self-regulate, and behave in lifelike ways. Their ability to continuously consume energy and regulate their behaviour opens the door to molecular systems that can adapt, make decisions, and perform complex tasks autonomously, with applications in medicine, biotechnology, and smart materials.
For now, designing such systems remains largely an empirical endeavour. „A general theoretical framework for designing such systems is still lacking. That’s the gap this project sets out to fill”, explains Prof. Esposito.
‟ By bringing modern tools from non equilibrium physics and thermodynamics into chemistry, this project aims to establish the theoretical principles needed to guide the design of complex chemical systems.”
Full professor in Theoretical physics
By developing a theoretical framework for energy-driven chemical networks, Prof. Esposito aims to uncover the physical principles that underlie the emergence of life-like chemical organisation and to enable the clear design principles of synthetic chemical systems. Just as engineers rely on the laws of physics to design bridges or aircraft, chemists could one day rely on comparable theoretical principles to design advanced molecular machines for medicine and biotechnology.