Abstract
Whitepaper #253 submitted to the Planetary Science and Astrobiology Decadal Survey 2023-2032. Topics: life and prebiotic organics; other science themes: Early Evolution; theory, computation, and modeling
Highlights
The early history of life on earth provided by top down approaches provides unique information and important perspectives for NASA’s astrobiology and exobiology programs
The complex macromolecular systems that characterized the LUCA, and patterns in the genetic code, represent metabolic order much like that reflected in biology today, suggesting that these interdependencies and at least part of the specification of terrestrial biochemistry evolved jointly with the functionality of macromolecules themselves
Increasing evidence from prebiotic chemistry experiments (Sahai et al, 2016), analysis of natural systems (Menez et al, 2018, Sforna et al, 2018), and study of the architecture of metabolic networks seems to suggest that these early biochemical processes were once catalyzed by mineral surfaces and small molecules other than protein and nucleotide polymers
Summary
The early history of life on earth provided by top down approaches provides unique information and important perspectives for NASA’s astrobiology and exobiology programs. Understanding the early biosphere gives us an extended set of features which may be informative of biological processes across a broader time window.
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