de Jong Thijs J, Demertzi Astra D, Robinson William E, Huck Wilhelm T S
Department of Physical Organic Chemistry, Institute for Molecules and Materials (IMM), Radboud University, Nijmegen, Netherlands.
Angew Chem Int Ed Engl. 2025 Jun 2;64(23):e202504659. doi: 10.1002/anie.202504659. Epub 2025 Mar 27.
It is generally accepted that minerals were an important source of prebiotic catalysis. In this work we demonstrate how the prebiotic sugar forming formose reaction is guided to unique reaction compositions in the presence of a variety of minerals. When the same mineral is transferred between multiple sequential batch reactions, a new reaction composition is obtained after each reaction cycle. We attribute this effect to the adsorption of catalytic Ca(OH) to mineral surfaces. Further exploration shows that first exposing the mineral surface to the aqueous catalyst allows the mineral to subsequently produce formose outputs without the need for any additional catalyst to be present. As such, the mineral surface functions as storage of the preceding environmental conditions. Our work supports the development of chemical complexity through the transfer of information between sequences of chemical environments.
人们普遍认为矿物质是益生元催化的重要来源。在这项工作中,我们展示了在多种矿物质存在的情况下,益生元糖形成的福尔摩斯反应是如何导向独特的反应组成的。当同一矿物质在多个连续的间歇反应之间转移时,每个反应循环后都会获得一种新的反应组成。我们将这种效应归因于催化性Ca(OH)在矿物表面的吸附。进一步的探索表明,首先将矿物表面暴露于水性催化剂中,随后矿物就能产生福尔摩斯反应产物,而无需任何额外的催化剂存在。因此,矿物表面起到了存储先前环境条件的作用。我们的工作支持通过化学环境序列之间的信息传递来发展化学复杂性。