Abstract
A variety of organic chemicals were likely available on prebiotic Earth. These derived from diverse processes including atmospheric and geochemical synthesis and extraterrestrial input, and were delivered to environments including oceans, lakes, and subaerial hot springs. Prebiotic chemistry generates both molecules used by modern organisms, such as proteinaceous amino acids, as well as many molecule types not used in biochemistry. As prebiotic chemical diversity was likely high, and the core of biochemistry uses a rather small set of common building blocks, the majority of prebiotically available organic compounds may not have been those used in modern biochemistry. Chemical evolution was unlikely to have been able to discriminate which molecules would eventually be used in biology, and instead, interactions among compounds were governed simply by abundance and chemical reactivity. Previous work has shown that likely prebiotically available α-hydroxy acids can combinatorially polymerize into polyesters that self-assemble to create new phases which are able to compartmentalize other molecule types. The unexpectedly rich complexity of hydroxy acid chemistry and the likely enormous structural diversity of prebiotic organic chemistry suggests chemical evolution could have been heavily influenced by molecules not used in contemporary biochemistry, and that there is a considerable amount of prebiotic chemistry which remains unexplored.
Highlights
How life emerged from inanimate chemistry is an unresolved scientific question and an area of active research [1,2,3]
Simple non-biomolecule monomers, best experimentally demonstrated so far using α-hydroxy free energy of the peptide is include around +3.5 kcal mol−1 under physiological conditions acids The
Thisthe property reactions betweensystems α-hydroxy acids (αHAs) and α-amino acid of monomers have been studied in model wet-drysuitable cycling makes polyester an abstract model non-biomolecular prebiotic polymer formation experiments co-polymerization reactions produce depsipeptide oligomers that for the study[44]
Summary
How life emerged from inanimate chemistry is an unresolved scientific question and an area of active research [1,2,3]. Simple non-biomolecule monomers, best experimentally demonstrated so far using α-hydroxy acids (αHAs) [38,39,40,44], but which could include many other prebiotic monomer types, can form diverse macromolecular assemblages with a wide range of physical properties and functions such as self-assembly and catalysis Though these are often dismissively lumped together as “tars,” such assemblies could present opportunities to form extremely complex “ecosystems” of microcompartments, each with different chemical properties, in which different abiotic chemistries could have been facilitated and their products exchanged. These could represent a pre-genomic analog of Woese’s rampant horizontal genome transfer-characterized LUCA [45], known as a progenote, and an important aspect of global chemical evolution According to this model, prior to LUCA, a community of progenotes [45], as in primitive entities in the process of (but prior to) establishing the genotype-phenotype relationship, could have dominated the prebiotic world while allowing for genetic information transfer amongst themselves and the surrounding environment. Chem. 1:30. [38] under a Creative Commons License
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