Enhancement of Prebiotic Peptide Formation in Cyclic Environments.

Autor: Boigenzahn H; Department of Chemical and Biological Engineering, University of Wisconsin-Madison, 1415 Engineering Drive, Madison, WI 53706, USA.; Wisconsin Institute for Discovery, University of Wisconsin-Madison, 330 N. Orchard Street, Madison, WI 53715, USA., Gagrani P; Wisconsin Institute for Discovery, University of Wisconsin-Madison, 330 N. Orchard Street, Madison, WI 53715, USA., Yin J; Department of Chemical and Biological Engineering, University of Wisconsin-Madison, 1415 Engineering Drive, Madison, WI 53706, USA. john.yin@wisc.edu.; Wisconsin Institute for Discovery, University of Wisconsin-Madison, 330 N. Orchard Street, Madison, WI 53715, USA. john.yin@wisc.edu.
Jazyk: angličtina
Zdroj: Origins of life and evolution of the biosphere : the journal of the International Society for the Study of the Origin of Life [Orig Life Evol Biosph] 2023 Dec; Vol. 53 (3-4), pp. 157-173. Date of Electronic Publication: 2023 Oct 28.
DOI: 10.1007/s11084-023-09641-2
Abstrakt: The dynamic behaviors of prebiotic reaction networks may be critically important to understanding how larger biopolymers could emerge, despite being unfavorable to form in water. We focus on understanding the dynamics of simple systems, prior to the emergence of replication mechanisms, and what role they may have played in biopolymer formation. We specifically consider the dynamics in cyclic environments using both model and experimental data. Cyclic environmental conditions prevent a system from reaching thermodynamic equilibrium, improving the chance of observing interesting kinetic behaviors. We used an approximate kinetic model to simulate the dynamics of trimetaphosphate (TP)-activated peptide formation from glycine in cyclic wet-dry conditions. The model predicts that environmental cycling allows trimer and tetramer peptides to sustain concentrations above the predicted fixed points of the model due to overshoot, a dynamic phenomenon. Our experiments demonstrate that oscillatory environments can shift product distributions in favor of longer peptides. However, experimental validation of certain behaviors in the kinetic model is challenging, considering that open systems with cyclic environmental conditions break many of the common assumptions in classical chemical kinetics. Overall, our results suggest that the dynamics of simple peptide reaction networks in cyclic environments may have been important for the formation of longer polymers on the early Earth. Similar phenomena may have also contributed to the emergence of reaction networks with product distributions determined not by thermodynamics, but rather by kinetics.
(© 2023. The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature B.V.)
Databáze: MEDLINE
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