Software proposes new prebiotic syntheses

Abstract

It’s hard to investigate the origins of life without having a good idea of what chemical building blocks would have been available. A research team led by and Sara Szymkuć has created a software, Allchemy, that generates networks of potential prebiotic molecules from a handful of simple starting materials ( 2020, DOI: ). The network shows that complex chemistry could have emerged from a basic set of small molecules that were present on early Earth. To create the software, the researchers started with what chemists know about the prebiotic syntheses that were likely possible on our planet before life emerged. Then they fed the program six simple starting materials that were present on early Earth—methane, ammonia, water, hydrogen cyanide, nitrogen gas, and hydrogen sulfide. Allchemy applied the reaction rules iteratively to create successive generations of reaction products connected by a proposed synthetic route. This created a network of hundreds of