The Origin of Life on Earth and the Design of Alternative Life Forms

Jack W Szostak

doi:10.1142/s2529732517400132

Abstract

To understand the origin of life on Earth, and to evaluate the potential for life on exoplanets, we must understand the pathways that lead from chemistry to biology. Recent experiments suggest that a chemically rich environment that provides the building blocks of membranes, nucleic acids and peptides, along with sources of chemical energy, could result in the emergence of replicating, evolving cells. The broad scope of synthetic chemistry suggests that it may be possible to design and construct artificial life forms based upon a very different biochemistry than that of existing biology.

Highlights

One of the things that I love about the subject of how life got started is that there are so many interesting questions, and that they cover such a wide range of fields, from astronomy to geology to chemistry and biology
Phosphate is not one of the starting materials, and it’s not in the product, but we know that phosphate had to be available in the environment because phosphate is part of nucleotides and it is part of RNA. Phosphate is both a good pH buffer and a good acid-base catalyst, and it turns out that in the presence of phosphate our two starting materials react rapidly to make much more looking at prebiotic chemistry that make it easier to understand how complicated compounds like nucleotides could be formed on the early Earth
I find it amazing that these three very closely related molecules, all made by simple chemistry from simple starting materials in the same or very similar environments, can go on to play different roles in building RNA molecules — this seems like a strong clue that this chemistry is truly relevant to the prebiotic chemistry of the early earth

Summary

Introduction

One of the things that I love about the subject of how life got started is that there are so many interesting questions, and that they cover such a wide range of fields, from astronomy to geology to chemistry and biology. Phosphate is both a good pH buffer and a good acid-base catalyst, and it turns out that in the presence of phosphate our two starting materials react rapidly to make much more looking at prebiotic chemistry that make it easier to understand how complicated compounds like nucleotides could be formed on the early Earth.

Results

Conclusion