熱の流れがプレバイオティック分子キッチンの秩序の秘密(Heat flows the secret to order in prebiotic molecular kitchen)

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2024-04-04 ミュンヘン大学(LMU)

生命は複雑で、細胞内の多くのプロセスも同様。進化により、正確な場所で高い効率で重要なプロセスが進行するようになった。40億年前の原始時代、生命の最初の条件が形成される中で、熱の単純な流れが化学的な混乱の中で秩序を生み出し、最初の前生物反応を促進した可能性がある。研究者たちはこの現象を実験的に示し、生命の材料が準備された「分子の台所」を地質学的なネットワークシステム内で作り出すことができるかどうかを調査する計画だ。

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熱流がプレバイオティクスのビルディングブロックを豊かにし、反応性を高める Heat flows enrich prebiotic building blocks and enhance their reactivity

Thomas Matreux,Paula Aikkila,Bettina Scheu,Dieter Braun & Christof B. Mast
Nature  Published:03 April 2024
DOI:https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-024-07193-7

熱の流れがプレバイオティック分子キッチンの秩序の秘密(Heat flows the secret to order in prebiotic molecular kitchen)

Abstract

The emergence of biopolymer building blocks is a crucial step during the origins of life1,2,3,4,5,6. 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 properties7,8, we numerically model and experimentally prove the advantageous effect of geological networks of interconnected cracks9,10 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 glycine11,12, 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.

1700応用理学一般
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