Chemists or uncover the mystery of the origins of life on Earth

SAN FRANCISCO, Dec. 6, according to foreign media reports, 40 billion years ago, the earth covered with a layer of sludge-like material, full of primitive molecules, gases and minerals, which are biologically defined And then I do not know why, just in this pot of prehistoric hodgepodge, suddenly appeared the key components of life - proteins, carbohydrates, amino acids, cell walls, etc. In the next billions of years, these substances will continue to combine, The final formation of the first batch of earth life.

Many chemists devote their lives to trying to understand the chemical and environmental conditions at the point of origin of life.But geological records provide few clues to synthesize simple molecules that might exist billions of years ago to test these ancient 'enzymes' Will the pre-historic raw materials into essential elements of life.

A group of chemists at the Scripps Research Institute recently released a report that they found a simple, primitive enzyme that reacts with early-stage catalysts to form parts of life-critical elements such as short-chain amino acids that provide energy to cells and form cell walls Lipids, as well as the storage of genetic information such as nucleotides.

Ramanarayanan Krishnamurthy, an associate professor of chemistry at the Scripps Research Institute and the lead author of the paper, has been working on a Called the DAP synthetase experiments, the substance can promote phosphorylation.Phosphorylation refers to a molecule to add a phosphate group, is a crucial chemical reaction process.No phosphorylation, there is no life.

'Both life and life 3 billion years ago are based on a large number of phosphorylation reactions.' 'Krishna Modi pointed out that' your body's RNA, DNA, and many biological molecules are phosphorylated products. Classes, amino acids and proteins are no exception. '

Phosphatases that trigger phosphorylation are protein kinases that use phosphorylation to send cleavage instructions to cells and increase the synthesis of a protein that initiates DNA strand unwinding or RNA formation.Crissar Modi believes that DAP Perhaps one of the first primitive protein kinases to turn on phosphorylation.

In order to test this theory, Krishnamurti and his colleagues simulated the early Earth's environment in the laboratory using two substrates, water and mud, and adjusted them to different pH levels: They incubated DAP with different concentrations of magnesium, Zinc, and a compound called imidazole, where imidazole acts as a catalyst to speed up the reaction, but the entire reaction still needs to last for weeks, sometimes months.

To validate the effect of DAP, it must successfully stimulate the phosphorylation reaction to form simple nucleotides, peptides, and cell walls under similar conditions, which were previously thought to be related to the origin of life only in the vastly different chemical and environmental , Krishnamurti found that DAP was able to perform all its tasks by first completing the phosphorylation of four RNA nucleotides, followed by short RNA-like chains, and then Fatty acids, lipids and peptide chains.

Does this mean that the DAP is the "pens" that turn random materials into life? Krishna Modi claimed not all.

'At best, we can only prove that simple chemicals can trigger further chemical reactions under the right conditions, which may produce biological-like substances, but we can not assert that this is the way in which early life on Earth was originated.'

First, Clisson N'Domodie simply could not prove that DAP was present on Earth 4 billion years ago and that he synthesized this molecule in the laboratory just to solve one of the basic difficulties in generating sulfation reaction in humid early Earth's environment. Want more sulfation reaction, you must remove water molecules in the process.

'How do you dehydrate a molecule when it's water all around?' Krishnamurti asked, 'From a thermodynamic point of view this is an extremely difficult task.'

And DAP manages to get around this problem because it removes ammonia from molecules, not water.

Krishna Modi is working with geologists to find out the origins of DAP in ancient times, such as the phosphate-rich magma stream that reacts with ammonia in the air and may produce DAP. In addition, DAP may also come from phosphates It may also originate from some distant star that was brought to Earth by meteorites.

But one thing is clear: Without the merit of DAP or something of a similar nature, the earth may still be a virgin swamp today.