Heat flows enrich prebiotic building blocks and enhance their reactivity

• 成果类型: Article
• 署名作者: Matreux, Thomas; Aikkila, Paula; Scheu, Bettina; Braun, Dieter; Mast, Christof B.
• 署名单位: University of Munich; University of Munich
• 刊物名称: Nature
• ISSN/ISSBN: 0028-5172
• DOI: 10.1038/s41586-024-07193-7
• 发表日期: 2024-04-04
• 关键词: thermal-diffusion; amino-acids; precursors; phosphorylation; pyrimidine; selection; common; rna

摘要

The emergence of biopolymer building blocks is a crucial step during the origins of life 1-6 . However, all known formation pathways rely on rare pure feedstocks and demand successive purification and mixing steps to suppress unwanted side reactions and enable high product yields. Here we show that heat flows through thin, crack-like geo-compartments could have provided a widely available yet selective mechanism that separates more than 50 prebiotically relevant building blocks from complex mixtures of amino acids, nucleobases, nucleotides, polyphosphates and 2-aminoazoles. Using measured thermophoretic properties 7,8 , we numerically model and experimentally prove the advantageous effect of geological networks of interconnected cracks 9,10 that purify the previously mixed compounds, boosting their concentration ratios by up to three orders of magnitude. The importance for prebiotic chemistry is shown by the dimerization of glycine 11,12 , in which the selective purification of trimetaphosphate (TMP) 13,14 increased reaction yields by five orders of magnitude. The observed effect is robust under various crack sizes, pH values, solvents and temperatures. Our results demonstrate how geologically driven non-equilibria could have explored highly parallelized reaction conditions to foster prebiotic chemistry. Heat flows through thin, crack-like geo-compartments are shown to purify previously mixed compounds and enhance their reactivity, providing a selective mechanism for separating molecules relevant to the chemical origins of life.