Ester-Mediated Amide Bond Formation Driven by Wet-Dry Cycles: A Possible Path to Polypeptides on the Prebiotic Earth

The Effect of Limited Diffusion and Wet-Dry Cycling on Reversible Polymerization Reactions: Implications for Prebiotic Synthesis of Nucleic Acids

A long-standing problem for the origins of life is that polymerization of many biopolymers, including nucleic acids and peptides, is thermodynamically unfavourable in aqueous solution. If bond making and breaking is reversible, monomers and very short oligomers predominate. Recent experiments have shown that wetting and drying cycles can overcome this problem and drive the formation of longer polymers. In the dry phase, bond formation is favourable, but diffusion is restricted, and bonds only form between monomers that are initially close together. In the wet phase, some of the bonds are hydrolyzed. However, repositioning of the molecules allows new bonds to form in the next dry phase, leading to an increase in mean polymer length. Here, we consider a simple theoretical model that explains the effect of cycling. There is an equilibrium length distribution with a high mean length that could be achieved if diffusion occurred freely in the dry phase. This equilibrium is inaccessible without diffusion. A single dry cycle without diffusion leads to mean lengths much shorter than this. Repeated cycling leads to a significant increase in polymerization relative to a single cycle. In the most favourable case, cycling leads to the same equilibrium length distribution as would be achieved if free diffusion were possible in the dry phase. These results support the RNA World scenario by explaining a potential route to synthesis of long RNAs; however, they also imply that cycling would be beneficial to the synthesis of other kinds of polymers, including peptides, where bond formation involves a condensation reaction.

Temperature oscillations near natural nuclear reactor cores and the potential for prebiotic oligomer synthesis

Geologic settings capable of driving prebiotic oligomer synthesis reactions remain a relatively unexplored aspect of origins of life research. Natural nuclear reactors are an example of Precambrian energy sources that produced unique temperature fluctuations. Heat transfer models indicate that water-moderated, convectively-cooled natural fission reactors in porous host rocks create temperature oscillations that resemble those employed in polymerase chain reaction (PCR) devices to artificially amplify oligonucleotides. This temperature profile is characterized by short-duration pulses up to 70-100 °C, followed by a sustained period of temperatures in the range of 30-70 °C, and finally a period of relaxation to ambient temperatures until the cycle is restarted by a fresh influx of pore water. For a given reactor configuration, temperature maxima and the time required to relax to ambient temperatures depend most strongly on the aggregate effect of host rock permeability in decreasing the thermal expansion and increasing the viscosity and evaporation temperature of the pore fluids. Once formed, fission-fueled reactors can sustain multi-kilowatt-level power production for 10(5)-10(6) years, ensuring microenvironmental longevity and chemical output. The model outputs indicate that organic synthesis on young planetary bodies with a sizeable reservoir of fissile material can involve more sophisticated energy dissipation pathways than modern terrestrial analog settings alone would suggest.

A Field Trip to the Archaean in Search of Darwin's Warm Little Pond

Charles Darwin’s original intuition that life began in a “warm little pond” has for the last three decades been eclipsed by a focus on marine hydrothermal vents as a venue for abiogenesis. However, thermodynamic barriers to polymerization of key molecular building blocks and the difficulty of forming stable membranous compartments in seawater suggest that Darwin’s original insight should be reconsidered. I will introduce the terrestrial origin of life hypothesis, which combines field observations and laboratory results to provide a novel and testable model in which life begins as protocells assembling in inland fresh water hydrothermal fields. Hydrothermal fields are associated with volcanic landmasses resembling Hawaii and Iceland today and could plausibly have existed on similar land masses rising out of Earth’s first oceans. I will report on a field trip to the living and ancient stromatolite fossil localities of Western Australia, which provided key insights into how life may have emerged in Archaean, fluctuating fresh water hydrothermal pools, geological evidence for which has recently been discovered. Laboratory experimentation and fieldwork are providing mounting evidence that such sites have properties that are conducive to polymerization reactions and generation of membrane-bounded protocells. I will build on the previously developed coupled phases scenario, unifying the chemical and geological frameworks and proposing that a hydrogel of stable, communally supported protocells will emerge as a candidate Woese progenote, the distant common ancestor of microbial communities so abundant in the earliest fossil record.

Collaboration between primitive cell membranes and soluble catalysts

One widely held model of early life suggests primitive cells consisted of simple RNA-based catalysts within lipid compartments. One possible selective advantage conferred by an encapsulated catalyst is stabilization of the compartment, resulting from catalyst-promoted synthesis of key membrane components. Here we show model protocell vesicles containing an encapsulated enzyme that promotes the synthesis of simple fatty acid derivatives become stabilized to Mg²⁺, which is required for ribozyme activity and RNA synthesis. Thus, protocells capable of such catalytic transformations would have enjoyed a selective advantage over other protocells in high Mg²⁺ environments. The synthetic transformation requires both the catalyst and vesicles that solubilize the water-insoluble precursor lipid. We suggest that similar modified lipids could have played a key role in early life, and that primitive lipid membranes and encapsulated catalysts, such as ribozymes, may have acted in conjunction with each other, enabling otherwise-impossible chemical transformations within primordial cells.

Early cells likely consisted of fatty acid vesicles enclosing magnesium-dependent ribozymes. Here, the authors show that fatty acid derivatives can form vesicles that, unlike those formed from only unmodified fatty acids, are stable in the presence of magnesium and could support ribozyme catalysis.

Formation of Amino Acids on the Sonolysis of Aqueous Solutions Containing Acetic Acid, Methane, or Carbon Dioxide, in the Presence of Nitrogen Gas

The sonolysis of aqueous solutions containing acetic acid, methane, or carbon dioxide in the presence of nitrogen gas was found to produce a number of different amino acids at a rate of ∼1 to 100 nM/min, using ultrasound at an operating power of 70 W and 355 kHz. Gas-phase elementary reactions are suggested, and discussed, to account for the formation of the complex biomolecules from the low molar mass solutes used. On the basis of the results, a new hypothesis is presented to explain the formation of amino acids under primitive atmospheric conditions and how their formation may be linked to the eventual abiotic genesis of life on Earth.

Sunlight as an energetic driver in the synthesis of molecules necessary for life

This review considers how photochemistry and sunlight-driven reactions can abiotically generate prebiotic molecules necessary for the evolution of life.

Kinetics of prebiotic depsipeptide formation from the ester–amide exchange reaction

In this work, we introduce a kinetic model to study the effectiveness of ester-mediated amide bond formation under prebiotic conditions.

Hydrothermal Conditions and the Origin of Cellular Life

The conditions and properties of hydrothermal vents and hydrothermal fields are compared in terms of their ability to support processes related to the origin of life. The two sites can be considered as alternative hypotheses, and from this comparison we propose a series of experimental tests to distinguish between them, focusing on those that involve concentration of solutes, self-assembly of membranous compartments, and synthesis of polymers. Key Word: Hydrothermal systems.