WestCHEM, School of Chemistry, University of Glasgow, Glasgow, United Kingdom G12 8QQ.
School of Life Sciences, College of Medical, Veterinary and Life Sciences, University of Glasgow, Glasgow, United Kingdom G12 8QQ.
Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 2019 Mar 19;116(12):5387-5392. doi: 10.1073/pnas.1813987116. Epub 2019 Mar 6.
Many approaches to the origin of life focus on how the molecules found in biology might be made in the absence of biological processes, from the simplest plausible starting materials. Another approach could be to view the emergence of the chemistry of biology as process whereby the environment effectively directs "primordial soups" toward structure, function, and genetic systems over time. This does not require the molecules found in biology today to be made initially, and leads to the hypothesis that environment can direct chemical soups toward order, and eventually living systems. Herein, we show how unconstrained condensation reactions can be steered by changes in the reaction environment, such as order of reactant addition, and addition of salts or minerals. Using omics techniques to survey the resulting chemical ensembles we demonstrate there are distinct, significant, and reproducible differences between the product mixtures. Furthermore, we observe that these differences in composition have consequences, manifested in clearly different structural and functional properties. We demonstrate that simple variations in environmental parameters lead to differentiation of distinct chemical ensembles from both amino acid mixtures and a primordial soup model. We show that the synthetic complexity emerging from such unconstrained reactions is not as intractable as often suggested, when viewed through a chemically agnostic lens. An open approach to complexity can generate compositional, structural, and functional diversity from fixed sets of simple starting materials, suggesting that differentiation of chemical ensembles can occur in the wider environment without the need for biological machinery.
许多关于生命起源的研究方法都集中在从最简单的合理起始材料出发，研究在没有生物过程的情况下，生物学中发现的分子是如何产生的。另一种方法可以将生物学化学的出现视为一个过程，即环境随着时间的推移有效地将“原始汤”引导到结构、功能和遗传系统上。这并不需要最初生成当今生物学中发现的分子，而是导致了这样的假设，即环境可以将化学汤引导到有序，最终引导到生命系统。在此，我们展示了不受约束的缩合反应如何可以通过改变反应环境（例如反应物的添加顺序以及添加盐或矿物质）来进行引导。使用组学技术来调查由此产生的化学混合物，我们证明了反应物添加顺序以及添加盐或矿物质之间存在明显的、显著的和可重复的差异。此外，我们观察到这些组成上的差异会产生后果，表现为明显不同的结构和功能特性。我们证明，即使在氨基酸混合物和原始汤模型中，环境参数的简单变化也会导致不同的化学混合物的分化。我们表明，当从化学上不可知的角度来看时，不受约束的反应所产生的合成复杂性并不像通常所认为的那样难以处理。从固定的简单起始材料中生成的开放复杂性方法可以产生组成、结构和功能多样性，这表明在更广泛的环境中，无需生物机制即可发生化学混合物的分化。
