ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2007
Extreme accumulation of nucleotides in simulated hydrothermal pore systems.
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2007. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 106 papers.
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106 citing papers in PubMed.
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- Some Factors from Theory, Simulation, Experiment and Proteomes in the Current Biosphere Supporting Deep Oceans as the Location of the Origin of Terrestrial Life.Life (Basel, Switzerland) · 2022Review
- Positively charged mineral surfaces promoted the accumulation of organic intermediates at the origin of metabolism.PLoS computational biology · 2022Article
- Opto-thermal technologies for microscopic analysis of cellular temperature-sensing systems.Biophysical reviews · 2022Review
- Label-free focusing of viral particles under a temperature gradient coupled with continuous swirling flow.RSC advances · 2022Article
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- Simple Ion-Gas Mixtures as a Source of Key Molecules Relevant to Prebiotic Chemistry.Molecules (Basel, Switzerland) · 2021Article
- Ribozyme Mutagenic Evolution: Mechanisms of Survival.Origins of life and evolution of the biosphere : the journal of the International Society for the Study of the Origin of Life · 2021Article
46 more citing papers are in PubMed but not listed here.
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6 authors.
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Abstract
We simulate molecular transport in elongated hydrothermal pore systems influenced by a thermal gradient. We find extreme accumulation of molecules in a wide variety of plugged pores. The mechanism is able to provide highly concentrated single nucleotides, suitable for operations of an RNA world at the origin of life. It is driven solely by the thermal gradient across a pore. On the one hand, the fluid is shuttled by thermal convection along the pore, whereas on the other hand, the molecules drift across the pore, driven by thermodiffusion. As a result, millimeter-sized pores accumulate even single nucleotides more than 10(8)-fold into micrometer-sized regions. The enhanced concentration of molecules is found in the bulk water near the closed bottom end of the pore. Because the accumulation depends exponentially on the pore length and temperature difference, it is considerably robust with respect to changes in the cleft geometry and the molecular dimensions. Whereas thin pores can concentrate only long polynucleotides, thicker pores accumulate short and long polynucleotides equally well and allow various molecular compositions. This setting also provides a temperature oscillation, shown previously to exponentially replicate DNA in the protein-assisted PCR. Our results indicate that, for life to evolve, complicated active membrane transport is not required for the initial steps. We find that interlinked mineral pores in a thermal gradient provide a compelling high-concentration starting point for the molecular evolution of life.
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