24 papers · ranked by Valyu relevance
Authors not listed
Origin of Life research is a fast growing field of study with each year bringing new breakthroughs. Recent discoveries include novel syntheses of life's building blocks, mechanisms of activation and interaction between molecules, and newly identified environments that provide promising conditions for these syntheses…
Skyla B. White, Paul B. Rimmer
Prebiotic Chemistry: Chemical Kinetics as a Window into Prebiotic Plausibility Authors: ['Skyla\nB. White' 'Paul B. Rimmer'] Title: Conspectus Origin of Life research is a fast growing field of study with each year bringing new breakthroughs. Recent discoveries include novel syntheses of life’s building blocks…
Bruno Cuevas-Zuviria, Zachary Adam, Daniel Cove, Betül Kaçar
The origin of life is one of the most compelling questions in science. While experimental prebiotic chemistry has produced a wide range of reactions and plausible pathways, the resulting data remain fragmented across numerous publications and disciplinary journals. Here, we introduce ChemOrigins, an open-access…
Paul B. Rimmer, Ch. Helling
There are many open questions about prebiotic chemistry in both planetary and exoplanetary environments. The increasing number of known exoplanets and other ultra-cool, substellar objects has propelled the desire to detect life and prebiotic chemistry outside the solar system. We present an ion-neutral chemical network…
Quoc Phuong Tran, Zachary R. Adam, Albert C. Fahrenbach
A prevailing strategy in origins of life studies is to explore how chemistry constrained by hypothetical prebiotic conditions could have led to molecules and system level processes proposed to be important for life’s beginnings. This strategy has yielded model prebiotic reaction networks that elucidate pathways by…
Sukrit Ranjan, Dimitar Sasselov
Ultraviolet (UV) radiation is common to most planetary environments, and could play a key role in the chemistry of molecules relevant to abiogenesis (prebiotic chemistry). In this work, we explore the impact of UV light on prebiotic chemistry that might occur in liquid water on the surface of a planet with an…
Lena Vincent, Stephanie Colón-Santos, H. James Cleaves II, David A. Baum + 4 more
'David A. Baum' 'Sarah E. Maurer' 'Alexander Ruf' 'Oliver Trapp' 'Louis B. Le Sergeant D’Hendecourt'] “Prebiotic soup” often features in discussions of origins of life research, both as a theoretical concept when discussing abiological pathways to modern biochemical building blocks and, more recently, as a feedstock in…
K. Eric Drexler
In a neglected 2005 paper, Nobel Laureate Paul Lauterbur proposed that molecular imprinting in amorphous materials—a phenomenon with an extensive experimental literature—played a key role in abiogenesis. The present paper builds on Lauterbur's idea to propose imprint-mediated templating (IMT), a mechanism for prebiotic…
Maaia Aleksandrova, Fidan Rahmatova, David A. Russell, Claudia Bonfio
Phospholipids are the primary constituents of cell membranes across all domains of life, but how and when phospholipids appeared on early Earth remains unknown. Previously described prebiotic pathways leading to complex phospholipids relied upon preexisting substrates, the availability of which on early Earth has yet…
Rotem Edri, Loren Dean Williams, Moran Frenkel-Pinter
Title: Conspectus The mystery of the origins of life is one of the most difficult yet intriguing challenges to which humanity has grappled. How did biopolymers emerge in the absence of enzymes (evolved biocatalysts), and how did long-lasting chemical evolution find a path to the highly selective complex biology that we…
Raya Roy, Anupam A. Sawant, Sudha Rajamani
Previous origin of life studies have demonstrated the presence of amino acids and nucleotides in the same prebiotic milieu. In this study, we set out to understand the interplay of amino acids with linear or cyclic nucleotides under prebiotically pertinent reaction conditions, especially for its implications for…
Nicholas J. Green, Jianfeng Xu, John D. Sutherland
Life’s Origins: UV Photochemistry in Abiotic Synthesis of Biomolecules Authors: ['Nicholas J. Green' 'Jianfeng Xu' 'John D. Sutherland'] Solar radiation is the principal source of energy available to Earth and has unmatched potential for the synthesis of organic material from primordial molecular building blocks. As…
Oliver R. Maguire, Iris B. A. Smokers, Bob G. Oosterom, Alla Zheliezniak + 1 more
Biochemistry is dependent upon enzyme catalysts accelerating key reactions. At the origin of life, prebiotic chemistry must have incorporated catalytic reactions. Whilst this would have yielded much needed amplification of certain reaction products, it would come at the possible cost of rapidly depleting the high…
Sreejith J. Varma, Kamila B. Muchowska, Paul Chatelain, Joseph Moran
The evolutionary origins of carbon fixation, the biological conversion of CO_2_ to metabolites, remain unclear. Phylogenetics indicates that the AcCoA pathway, the reductive fixation of CO_2_ to acetyl and pyruvate, was a key biosynthetic route used by the Last Universal Common Ancestor (LUCA) to build its…
Stephanie J. Zhang, Xiwen Jia, Saurja DasGupta, Jack W. Szostak
Nonenzymatic assembly of activated RNA building blocks, such as phosphorimidazolides, would have been essential for the emergence of ribozymes on the early Earth. We previously showed that ribonucleoside monophosphates can be activated to phosphorimidazolides via a prebiotically relevant phospho-Passerini reaction…
Silvana Pinna, Cäcilia Kunz, Stuart Harrison, Sean F. Jordan + 3 more
ATP is universally conserved as the principal energy currency in cells, driving metabolism through phosphorylation and condensation reactions. Such deep conservation suggests that ATP arose at an early stage of biochemical evolution. Yet purine synthesis requires six phosphorylation steps linked to ATP hydrolysis. This…
Xiaoqian Yu, Thomas Gurry, Le Thanh Tu Nguyen, Hunter S. Richardson + 1 more
Prebiotics confer benefits to human health often by promoting the growth of gut bacteria that produce metabolites valuable to the human body, such as short chain fatty acids (SCFAs). While prebiotic selection has strongly focused on maximizing the production of SCFAs, less attention has been paid to gases, a byproduct…
Sukrit Ranjan, Corinna L. Kufner, Gabriella G. Lozano, Zoe R. Todd + 2 more
'Azra Haseki' 'Dimitar Sasselov'] Ultraviolet (UV) light plays a key role in surficial theories of the origin of life, and numerous studies have focused on constraining the atmospheric transmission of UV radiation on early Earth. However, the UV transmission of the natural waters in which originsof-life chemistry…
Slim Smaoui, Antonella Pasqualone, Phisit Seesuriyachan
Agro-industrial wastes are abundant, low-cost feedstocks used for the sustainable production of prebiotic oligosaccharides via enzymatic methods. This review summarizes recent advances, with particular emphasis on studies published after 2020, in the enzymatic valorization of these by-products, highlighting…
Authors not listed
The reverse/reductive tricarboxylic acid (rTCA) cycle is a metabolic pathway that facilitates CO2 fixation in certain anaerobic bacteria and archaea. Its presence in phylogenetically ancient organisms has led to hypotheses about its role in the early evolution of CO2 fixation pathways. While the thermodynamics of the…
Serge Nader, Lorenzo Sebastianelli, Sheref S. Mansy
It is common to compare life with machines. Both consume fuel and release waste to run. In biology, the engine that drives the living system is referred to as metabolism. However, attempts at deciphering the origins of metabolism do not focus on this energetic relationship that sustains life but rather concentrate on…
S. Furkan Ozturk, Dimitar D. Sasselov, John D. Sutherland
Biological systems are homochiral, raising the question of how a racemic mixture of prebiotically synthesized biomolecules could attain a homochiral state at the network level. Based on our recent results, we aim to address a related question of how chiral information might have flowed in a prebiotic network. Utilizing…
Tomislav Stolar, Ben K. D. Pearce, Martin Etter, Khai-Nghi Truong + 8 more
The information molecule of the first life on Earth is presumably ribonucleic acid (RNA). RNA is a polymer built out of four canonical nucleobases: adenine (A), uracil (U), guanine (G), and cytosine (C). However, it remains unclear how canonical nucleobases got selected from the hundreds available in nature. Here, we…
Authors not listed
A primitive, chemically fueled phosphonodithiolates reaction cascade was constructed using phosphate-based T3P as the chemical fuel and 4-methoxybenzenethiol as the precursor molecule. This reaction cascade functions as a primitive metabolism network, utilizing higher-energy phosphate-based fuel and…