Heat flows enrich prebiotic building blocks and enhance their reactivity.

ABSTRACT: 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 previ

SUBMITTER: Matreux T 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC10990939 | biostudies-literature | 2024 Apr

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature