Chemical origin of life articles within Nature Communications

Featured

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Cyanide is thought to be crucial for the origin of life. Here, the authors showed that iron cyanocarbonyl complexes are present in meteorites and propose that these compounds were a source of free cyanide on early Earth and served as precursors to the active sites of ancient hydrogenases.

    • Karen E. Smith
    • , Christopher H. House
    •  & Michael P. Callahan

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Understanding how simple chemical mixtures transition into truly emergent systems is essential to create new lifelike materials. Here, the authors show a self-replicating system that can be maintained out-of-equilibrium by an oxidant fuel in analogy to simple metabolic cycles.

    • Sarah M. Morrow
    • , Ignacio Colomer
    •  & Stephen P. Fletcher

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Extraterrestrial sources may have provided prebiotic phosphorus to the early Earth. Here, the authors investigate the potential of phosphine-doped astrochemical analog ices to form phosphorus oxoacids as precursors to more complex prebiotic compounds.

    • Andrew M. Turner
    • , Alexandre Bergantini
    •  & Ralf I. Kaiser

  • Article
    | Open Access

    So far little is known about how encapsulation affects the activity and folding of RNA, which is of interest for understanding the origin of cellular life. Here the authors show that encapsulation of functional RNA in vesicles increases RNA activity and improves RNA folding through a biophysical confinement effect.

    • Ranajay Saha
    • , Samuel Verbanic
    •  & Irene A. Chen

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Understanding self-replication and persistence in an out-of-equilibrium state is key to designing systems with new properties mimicking “living systems”. Here, the authors developed a synthetic small molecule system in which a transient surfactant replicator is responsible for both an autocatalytic aggregation pathway and a destructive pathway.

    • Ignacio Colomer
    • , Sarah M. Morrow
    •  & Stephen P. Fletcher

  • Article
    | Open Access

    There is still much debate on early Earth geochemical conditions affecting the chemistry of simple synthons that originated life. Here, the authors report an uninterrupted multistep synthetic route to 2-aminooxazole by means of flow chemistry equipment, mimicking a plausible early Earth (geo)chemical scenario.

    • Dougal J. Ritson
    • , Claudio Battilocchio
    •  & John D. Sutherland

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Phosphorus is presumed to have been a limiting nutrient in the Archean ocean due to binding to iron oxides. Here, the authors show the heating of iron with phosphate results in the reduction of phosphate to the ion phosphite, which is solubilized and ameliorates the issue of a low Archean phosphorus supply.

    • Barry Herschy
    • , Sae Jung Chang
    •  & Matthew A. Pasek

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Amyloids may have played an important role in prebiotic molecular evolution but understanding replication of such information-coding molecules is still a problem. Here the authors design a model amyloid substrate and demonstrate sequence regio- and stereoselectivity during template-based replication.

    • Saroj K. Rout
    • , Michael P. Friedmann
    •  & Jason Greenwald

  • Article
    | Open Access

    How RNA building blocks have formed on an early Earth by a continuous process is still a mystery awaiting its solution. Here, the authors report that fluctuations of physical parameters like temperature and pH could have been enough to facilitate nucleoside formation from simple starting materials.

    • Sidney Becker
    • , Christina Schneider
    •  & Thomas Carell

  • Article
    | Open Access

    The citric acid cycle (TCA) is a fundamental metabolic pathway to release stored energy in living organisms. Here, the authors report two linked cycles of reactions that each oxidize glyoxylate into CO2 and generate intermediates shared with the modern TCA cycle, shedding light into a plausible TCA protometabolism.

    • Greg Springsteen
    • , Jayasudhan Reddy Yerabolu
    •  & Ramanarayanan Krishnamurthy

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Clay is thought to have played a part in the origin of life. Here, the authors show that layered double hydroxides, a type of clay little studied despite its presumed prevalence on the early Earth, can facilitate the formation of small proteins.

    • Valentina Erastova
    • , Matteo T. Degiacomi
    •  & H. Chris Greenwell

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Proton motive forces are central for life but it is not well understood how these pH gradients emerged at the beginning of life. Here the authors show that heat flow across a water-filled chamber forms and sustains stable pH gradients and support their experimental findings with simulations.

    • Lorenz M. R. Keil
    • , Friederike M. Möller
    •  & Christof B. Mast

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Few studies have explored the effect of a changing environment on artificial chemical evolution. Here, the authors develop an evolutionary platform that alters the physical environment of droplet protocells, showing that a population of simple chemical species can adapt to its surroundings, in analogy to natural evolution.

    • Juan Manuel Parrilla-Gutierrez
    • , Soichiro Tsuda
    •  & Leroy Cronin

  • Article
    | Open Access

    The synthesis of biopolymers in living cells is perfected by complex machinery, however this was not the case on early Earth. Here the authors show the role of non-enzymatic replication in the enrichment of certain products within prebiotically relevant mixtures.

    • Jayanta Nanda
    • , Boris Rubinov
    •  & Gonen Ashkenasy

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Early molecules of life likely served both as templates and catalysts, raising the question of how functionally distinct genomes and enzymes arose. Here, the authors show that conflict between evolution at the molecular and cellular levels can drive functional differentiation of the two strands of self-replicating molecules and lead to copy number differences between the two.

    • Nobuto Takeuchi
    • , Paulien Hogeweg
    •  & Kunihiko Kaneko

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Coupling compartmentalisation and molecular replication is essential for the development of evolving chemical systems. Here the authors show an oil-in-water droplet containing a self-replicating amphiphilic imine that can undergo repeated droplet division.

    • J. W. Taylor
    • , S. A. Eghtesadi
    •  & L. Cronin

  • Article
    | Open Access

    The emergence of novel catalytic functions in ancient proteins likely played a role in the evolution of modern enzymes. Here, the authors use protein sequences from Precambrian beta-lactamases and demonstrate that a single hydrophobic-to-ionizable amino acid mutation can lead to substantial Kemp eliminase activity.

    • Valeria A. Risso
    • , Sergio Martinez-Rodriguez
    •  & Jose M. Sanchez-Ruiz

  • Article
    | Open Access

    While mechanisms have been proposed for the prebiotic nucleotide synthesis, these require separate (and potentially incompatible) routes for pyrimidines and purines. Here the authors show that both of these classes of molecules can be formed by a divergent synthesis from a common prebiotic precursor.

    • Shaun Stairs
    • , Arif Nikmal
    •  & Matthew W. Powner

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Some of the earliest life on Earth flourished in terrestrial hot springs. Here, the authors present evidence for ca. 3.5 Ga hot spring deposits from the Dresser Formation, Pilbara Craton, Australia, that host some of the earliest known life in the form of stromatolites and other microbial biosignatures.

    • Tara Djokic
    • , Martin J. Van Kranendonk
    •  & Colin R. Ward

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Adverse early life experiences can have negative consequences for health and survival in later life. Here, Tung et al. show that in female baboons, the cumulative number of adverse experiences can be a strong predictor of lifespan.

    • Jenny Tung
    • , Elizabeth A. Archie
    •  & Susan C. Alberts

  • Article
    | Open Access

    The first steps in the transition to multicellularity remain poorly understood. Here, the authors demonstrate that disrupting a single gene in yeast results in multicellular clusters that develop clonally and possess a high degree of multicellular heritability, predisposing them to multicellular adaptation.

    • William C. Ratcliff
    • , Johnathon D. Fankhauser
    •  & Michael Travisano

Browse broader subjects

Browse Chemical origin of life across other nature.com journals