ArticleAstrobiology2017
Detecting Darwinism from Molecules in the Enceladus Plumes, Jupiter's Moons, and Other Planetary Water Lagoons.
Article in Astrobiology, 2017. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 22 papers.
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Who cites it
22 citing papers in PubMed, 60 citations in OpenAlex.
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- Interstep compatibility of a model for the prebiotic synthesis of RNA consistent with Hadean natural history.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2025Article
- Energy-ordered resource stratification as an agnostic signature of life.Nature communications · 2025Article
- Astrobiological implications of the stability and reactivity of peptide nucleic acid (PNA) in concentrated sulfuric acid.Science advances · 2025Article
- Cancer cell target discovery: comparing laboratory evolution of expanded DNA six-nucleotide alphabets with standard four-nucleotide alphabets.Nucleic acids research · 2025Article
- The HOMO-LUMO Gap as Discriminator of Biotic from Abiotic Chemistries.Life (Basel, Switzerland) · 2024Article
- Enzyme-assisted high throughput sequencing of an expanded genetic alphabet at single base resolution.Nature communications · 2024Article
- One chiral fingerprint to find them all.Journal of cheminformatics · 2024Article
- Enzyme-Assisted High Throughput Sequencing of an Expanded Genetic Alphabet at Single Base Resolution.Research square · 2023Article
- Rethinking nucleic acids from their origins to their applications.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2023Review
- Science Objectives for Flagship-Class Mission Concepts for the Search for Evidence of Life at Enceladus.Astrobiology · 2022Article
- Evaluating Biosignatures for Life Detection.Astrobiology · 2020Article
- Review
- The Complex Molecules Detector (CMOLD): A Fluidic-Based Instrument Suite to Search for (Bio)chemical Complexity on Mars and Icy Moons.Astrobiology · 2020Article
- On the Potential of Silicon as a Building Block for Life.Life (Basel, Switzerland) · 2020Article
- Article
- Radiation Tolerance of Nanopore Sequencing Technology for Life Detection on Mars and Europa.Scientific reports · 2019Article
- Functional Properties of Amino Acid Side Chains as Biomarkers of Extraterrestrial Life.Astrobiology · 2018Article
- The Ladder of Life Detection.Astrobiology · 2018Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
1 author at 1 institution in 1 country.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
To the astrobiologist, Enceladus offers easy access to a potential subsurface biosphere via the intermediacy of a plume of water emerging directly into space. A direct question follows: If we were to collect a sample of this plume, what in that sample, through its presence or its absence, would suggest the presence and/or absence of life in this exotic locale? This question is, of course, relevant for life detection in any aqueous lagoon that we might be able to sample. This manuscript reviews physical chemical constraints that must be met by a genetic polymer for it to support Darwinism, a process believed to be required for a chemical system to generate properties that we value in biology. We propose that the most important of these is a repeating backbone charge; a Darwinian genetic biopolymer must be a "polyelectrolyte." Relevant to mission design, such biopolymers are especially easy to recover and concentrate from aqueous mixtures for detection, simply by washing the aqueous mixtures across a polycharged support. Several device architectures are described to ensure that, once captured, the biopolymer meets two other requirements for Darwinism, homochirality and a small building block "alphabet." This approach is compared and contrasted with alternative biomolecule detection approaches that seek homochirality and constrained alphabets in non-encoded biopolymers. This discussion is set within a model for the history of the terran biosphere, identifying points in that natural history where these alternative approaches would have failed to detect terran life. Key Words: Enceladus-Life detection-Europa-Icy moon-Biosignatures-Polyelectrolyte theory of the gene. Astrobiology 17, 840-851.
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