Abstract
Life is a complex, open chemical system that must be supported with energy inputs. If one fathoms how simple early life must have been, the complexity of modern-day life is staggering by comparison. A minimally complex system that could plausibly provide pyrophosphates for early life could be the oxidation of reduced phosphorus sources such as hypophosphite and phosphite. Like all plausible prebiotic chemistries, this system would have been altered by minerals and rocks in close contact with the evolving solutions. This study addresses the different types of perturbations that minerals might have on this chemical system. This study finds that minerals may inhibit the total production of oxidized phosphorus from reduced phosphorus species, they may facilitate the production of phosphate, or they may facilitate the production of pyrophosphate. This study concludes with the idea that mineral perturbations from the environment increase the chemical complexity of this system.
Highlights
Depending on which reduced P source is initially placed in the environment, this system will generate a complex mixture of P species at different redox states (Figure 2)
The preliminary work was carried out with hypophosphite solutional systems; increased oxidation of phosphorus species in solution was observed in the presence of hydroxyapatite and schreibersite (Table S2)
We verified that the use of insoluble iron mineral species without any soluble iron results in no reaction by adding powdered magnetite with no added soluble iron (FeCl2 ) in solution, and we observed no to little (
Summary
Life is the ultimate example of a complex chemical system [1,2]. As such, it must be buttressed by energetic inputs to maintain homeostasis. When coupled to the oxidation of reduced phosphorus species, such as hypophosphite (H2 PO2 − ) and phosphite (HPO3 2− ), these hydroxyl radicals, liberated from the Fenton reaction, oxidized these reduced P compounds to phosphate and pyrophosphate (P2 O7 4− ) [13,14,15]. Pyrophosphate may have been life’s original energy currency, though this is debated [16,17,18] This Fenton system, coupled with reduced phosphorus, may be a plausible system on rocky planets, such as the early Earth [5,14,15]. The water contained multiple phosphorus species, including reduced phosphorus species, such as hypophosphite (H2 PO2 − ) and phosphite (HPO3 2− )
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