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+--- Thread: Article Tracing life’s origins with early Earth chemistry (/thread-14325.html)
Tracing life’s origins with early Earth chemistry - C C - Jul 3, 2023
https://www.advancedsciencenews.com/tracing-lifes-origins-with-early-earth-chemistry/
EXCERPTS: Billions of years ago, Earth was a vastly different planet characterized by a harsh environment that could not support life. Volcanic eruptions, lightning storms, and the constant bombardment of meteorites and comets shaped its atmosphere and surface.
These tumultuous conditions were instrumental in creating organic molecules, such as amino acids, nucleotides, and simple sugars, that would eventually lead to life as we know it. But how exactly this transformation occurred remains one of the most enduring mysteries in scientific research.
In a recent study published in Small Methods, a team of scientists presents an intriguing hypothesis. They propose that “non-biological” organic molecules — those that are carbon-based but not typically used by biological systems today — may have played a pivotal role in helping primitive chemical systems evolve into their current, complex forms.
“No one really knows exactly what happened on early Earth or what chemicals or reactions were present,” explained Tony Z. Jia, specially appointed associate professor at the Earth-Life Science Institute, Tokyo Institute of Technology and one of the study’s lead authors, in an email.
“While it’s impossible to know exactly without a time machine, we do our best to replicate plausible conditions in the lab in the hopes of understanding how early Earth chemistry resulted in the origin of life,” he added.
[...] The team’s findings were intriguing. As Chen explained, “We found that polyester microdroplets could uptake salts, and that different salts are taken up at different rates.” Moreover, the salts tended to accumulate near the charged surfaces of the droplets, resulting in an overall neutralization of the droplet’s surface charge.
“Because of this, the droplets then stopped repelling one another, and instead started to coalesce,” added Chen. “This is significant as it could explain one way in which primitive polyester microdroplets could have grown — a hallmark of life.”
These findings shed light on the fact that even slight variations in salt uptake can significantly influence the structure of these possible protocells. This observation also offers a potential explanation for the diverse chemistries observed in primitive systems that emerged in different aqueous environments, ranging from freshwater to oceanic to hypersaline under-ocean brines... (MORE - missing details)