Abstract
Specialists in several branches of life sciences are trying to solve, piece by piece, the immensely complex puzzle of the origin of life. Some parts of the puzzle seem to appear with a rather high degree of clarity, while others remain totally obscure. We cannot be sure that life emerged only on our Earth, but we believe that the presence of large amounts of water in its liquid state is absolutely essential for the emergence and evolution of living matter. We can also assume that the latter exploits everywhere the same light elements, mainly C, H, O, N, S, and P, and somehow manipulates the same simple monomeric and polymeric organic compounds, such as alpha-amino acids, carbohydrates, nucleic bases, and surface-active carboxylic acids. The author contributes to the field by stating that all fundamental particles of our matter are “homochiral” and predominantly produce in an absolute asymmetric synthesis amino acids of L-configuration and carbohydrates of D-series. Another important point is that free atmospheric oxygen mainly stems from the photolysis of water molecules by cosmic irradiation and is not necessarily bound to living organisms on the planet.
Highlights
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In the living matter on Earth, all amino acids belong to the L-configurational series, and all saccharides relate to D-pentose
While the above life-related compounds and aggregates incorporating amino acids, nucleotides, carbohydrates, and lipids can be considered as rather universal initial building blocks for composing living matter, the roots of their self-assembly into micelles, vesicles, protocells, and “protoliving systems" are so numerous and diverse that the emergence of final “ancestral organisms” on Earth might be regarded as a matter of chance
Summary
One can find in the literature more than 130 definitions of the term “life”. Most of them relate to Homo sapiens and sound like a philosophical exercise. The physicist Erwin Schrödinger [1] defined living matter as that which “avoids the decay into equilibrium” This definition implies that, when alive, organic systems consume energy from their environment and function against the Second Law of Thermodynamics, which says that entropy of any system must steadily increase. Though the above definitions seem to be rather logical, they are by no means sufficient from the point of view of life sciences They give no answer to the simple question of whether viruses are alive or not. Homochirality of initial organic molecules is the pre-condition for the living systems to both emerge and further proliferate. If the answer is yes, what is the origin of homochirality? Could it not result in a further step of evolution? To answer this question, we have to approach it from the point of view of general laws of chemistry and analyze, step by step, unquestionable conditions for the emergence of the first living matter anywhere in the Universe
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