Frequent Dry Spells Could Have Been Essential For Life to Emerge on Earth

The mystery of how life came to be on Earth is a long standing one. For every leap forward there are dead ends.

Life seems to depend on water from the very beginning. The process of growing some of life's most vital components has a frustrating reluctance to get wet.

John Yin is a biochemical engineer at the University of Wisconsin– Madison.

It's been a question of how we could get these things to form bonds and strings in a way that leads to a living cell. The chemistry involved tends to fail in the presence of water, so the question is difficult.

It's hard to reconcile the role water might play in the origins of those first self-replicating reactions with the prevailing theory that life emerged from a decidedly wet primordial soup.

A University of Wisconsin–Madison chemical engineer led a study into a simulation of a changing environment that could be replicated in nature with tidal and day/night cycles.

A selection of amino acids has proven to be easy to produce. The resulting structures are a good bet for being involved in early forms of biology.

It is difficult to get those units to link together. The researchers used the substance.

They put trimetaphosphate into their soup.

The soup was spiced with NaOH to make it more acidic.

During the first hour of the experiment, the two unit molecule was made. The brakes on the whole process are put on by the release of protons in the reaction.

As the solution's pH became more neutral, the dimers began to link with each other into longer chains. The team suspects that the reaction rate went up as the solution dried out.

It doesn't have to be the same environment throughout all the reactions. They can happen in different environments if the reactions that are occurring help create an environment that is beneficial for the next steps.

A cycle of transitions between wet and dry conditions could grow the molecule into a more complex one.

Boigen said that it may be worthwhile to pay more attention to the effects of proposed prebiotic reactions on their environment in addition to the effects of the environment on the reactions.

The origins of life may have happened at the edge of the water. The air-water boundary of tiny droplets has been found to have more reactivity to free floating amino acids. These reactions happened without the need for other chemicals or radiation.

Making sense of the processes behind the creation of life could lead to new, more powerful chemistry-based technologies.

Yin says that eventually you may create chemical systems that are able to store information.

The density of a computer chip can be thousands of times greater than the density ofDNA. If we could get systems that do this without being living cells, then you would start to think about all sorts of new functions and processes occurring at the molecule level.

The research was published in a book.