The fountain of life: Water droplets hold the secret ingredient for building life

Scientists have been stumped by the mechanism for peptide-forming reactions in water for decades.

Graham Cooks, the Henry Bohn Hass distinguished professor of analytical chemistry in the college of science, said that this is the chemistry behind the origin of life. This is a big deal.

This water-based chemistry could lead to the faster development of drugs to treat diseases like Alzheimer's and Parkinson's. The team's discovery was published.

Scientists believe that life began in the ocean. The chemistry was still a mystery. meteorites deliver raw amino acids to early Earth every day and they can form peptides, the building blocks of life. It seems unlikely that a water molecule would be lost in a wet environment. It needed water to survive. It had to be away from the water.

According to Cooks and his team, water isn't wet everywhere. Rapid reactions can occur on the margins, where the water droplets meet the atmosphere. Life's potential evolution could be seen in places where sea spray flies into the air and waves pound the land.

The chemists have used mass spectrometers for more than a decade to study chemical reactions in droplets.

Cooks said that the rates of reactions in droplets were anywhere from a hundred to a million times faster than the same chemicals in bulk solution.

In the case of early Earth chemistry, the evolution of life is possible because of the high rates of these reactions. The goal has been to understand how this process works. Scientists can use the secret of how life arose on Earth to find life on other planets or even moons.

Scientists' understanding of chemical synthesis has been changed by understanding how amino acids build themselves up. Synthetic chemists can now use that same chemistry to speed up their reactions to discover and develop new drugs and treatments for diseases.

Cooks said that the buildings with the lights on are where synthetic chemists work. Experiments are so slow that they take days or weeks to complete. In order to speed up the synthesis of novel chemicals and potential new drugs, we have built an apparatus that uses droplet chemistry.

More information: Holden, Dylan T. et al, Aqueous microdroplets enable abiotic synthesis and chain extension of unique peptide isomers from free amino acids, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (2022). DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2212642119. doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2212642119 Journal information: Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences