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ORIGIN OF LIFE
Primordial soup that cooks itself
The spontaneous syntheses of some of lifes building blocks from simple precursors have previously been demonstrated in isolation. Now it has been shown that they might all emerge from just one set of ingredients.
Paul J. Bracher
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The origin of life is a problem that belongs to chemistry. Physics alone is too abstract to answer the
question, and by the time one arrivesat biology, the question has long sincebeen answered. In surveying modern biology for clues, gumshoe chemists facean extraordinary challenge: what single prebiotic environment could have given rise to the diverse array of molecules life uses to store information, administrate metabolism and protect itself in dened compartments? Writing in Nature Chemistry, John Sutherland and co-workers report remarkable progress towards this goal, with the discovery of conditionsthat enable the syntheses of precursors to molecules that perform all three of these functions in modern biology1.
Most of the well-known, pioneering studies in prebiotic synthesis have uncovered conditions for the production of a single class of biomolecule at a time2.
The famous MillerUrey experiment demonstrated how amino acids could be synthesized from electrical discharges through atmospheres of reduced gases3. The formose reaction discovered by Butlerow aords complex mixtures of sugars from the polymerization of formaldehyde4.
And the work of Or demonstrated howthe nucleobase adenine is produced when ammonium cyanide is heated in aqueous solution5. But these systems oen operate under conditions that are mutually incompatible, and each system will produce reasonable yields only in isolation. Although it is possible that a set of discordant environments somehow linked togetherto form a distribution network for organic molecules on early Earth, it also seems unlikely. In contrast, single environments that can support the synthesis of a varietyof molecules garner appeal for being more simple and straightforward.
In 2009, Sutherland and co-workers reported prebiotically feasible conditions that enabled the synthesis of activated pyrimidine ribonucleotides from feedstocks of simple precursors such as glycolaldehyde, cyanamide and phosphate6. Their subsequent
work showed how glycolaldehyde and glyceraldehyde two- and three-carbon sugars involved in this system will participate in reactions with hydrogen cyanide and hydrogen sulde to form -aminonitriles. These compounds could subsequently hydrolyse to yield the corresponding -amino acids7,8. Now,
they...