ArticleJournal of the Royal Society, Interface2015
The life story of hydrogen peroxide II: a periodic pH and thermochemical drive for the RNA world.
Article in Journal of the Royal Society, Interface, 2015. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 7 papers.
What it found
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
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Who cites it
7 citing papers in PubMed, 20 citations in OpenAlex.
- Hydrogen peroxide on Mars and icy moons: Implications for the search for extraterrestrial signatures of prebiotic chemistry.Fundamental research · 2026Review
- Reciprocating thermochemical mediator of pre-biotic polymer decomposition on mineral surfaces.Journal of the Royal Society, Interface · 2025Article
- Does Stochasticity Favour Complexity in a Prebiotic Peptide-Micelle System?Origins of life and evolution of the biosphere : the journal of the International Society for the Study of the Origin of Life · 2021Article
- Modelling Bacteria-Inspired Dynamics with Networks of Interacting Chemicals.Life (Basel, Switzerland) · 2019Article
- Toy trains, loaded dice and the origin of life: dimerization on mineral surfaces under periodic drive with Gaussian inputs.Royal Society open science · 2017Article
- Reaction-diffusion processes at the nano- and microscales.Nature nanotechnology · 2016Review
- Thiosulfate-Hydrogen Peroxide Redox Oscillator as pH Driver for Ribozyme Activity in the RNA World.Origins of life and evolution of the biosphere : the journal of the International Society for the Study of the Origin of Life · 2016Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
2 authors at 2 institutions in 2 countries.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
It is now accepted that primordial non-cellular RNA communities must have been subject to a periodic drive in order to replicate and prosper. We have proposed the oxidation of thiosulfate by hydrogen peroxide as this drive. This reaction system behaves as (i) a thermochemical and (ii) a pH oscillator, and in this work, we unify (i) and (ii) for the first time. We report thermally self-consistent, dynamical simulations in which the system transitions smoothly from nearly isothermal pH to fully developed thermo-pH oscillatory regimes. We use this oscillator to drive simulated replication of a 39-bp RNA species. Production of replicated duplex under thermo-pH drive was significantly enhanced compared with that under purely thermochemical drive, effectively allowing longer strands to replicate. Longer strands are fitter, with more potential to evolve enzyme activity and resist degradation. We affirm that concern over the alleged toxicity of hydrogen peroxide to life is largely misplaced in the current context, we survey its occurrence in the solar system to motivate its inclusion as a biosignature in the search for life on other worlds and highlight that pH oscillations in a spatially extended, bounded system manifest as the fundamental driving force of life: a proton gradient.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.