ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2019
Environmental control programs the emergence of distinct functional ensembles from unconstrained chemical reactions.
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2019. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 29 papers.
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Who cites it
29 citing papers in PubMed, 65 citations in OpenAlex.
- Article
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- Harnessing prebiotic formamide chemistry: a novel platform for antiviral exploration.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- Environmental History is Transferred via Minerals Altering Formose Reaction Pathways.Angewandte Chemie (International ed. in English) · 2025Article
- Catalytic peptide/hemin complex from ester-amide exchange reaction mediated by deep eutectic solvents.RSC advances · 2025Article
- Selection-diversification interplay in oligonucleotide chemical evolution.Biophysics and physicobiology · 2025Article
- Alternative Pathways in Astrobiology: Reviewing and Synthesizing Contingency and Non-Biomolecular Origins of Terrestrial and Extraterrestrial Life.Life (Basel, Switzerland) · 2024Review
- Modulation of electrical activity of proteinoid microspheres with chondroitin sulfate clusters.PloS one · 2024Article
- Kinetic Modeling and Parameter Estimation of a Prebiotic Peptide Reaction Network.Journal of molecular evolution · 2023Article
- The hierarchical organization of autocatalytic reaction networks and its relevance to the origin of life.PLoS computational biology · 2022Article
- Supramolecular systems chemistry through advanced analytical techniques.Analytical and bioanalytical chemistry · 2022Review
- Environmental conditions drive self-organization of reaction pathways in a prebiotic reaction network.Nature chemistry · 2022Article
- An open source computational workflow for the discovery of autocatalytic networks in abiotic reactions.Chemical science · 2022Article
- Differential Oligomerization of Alpha versus Beta Amino Acids and Hydroxy Acids in Abiotic Proto-Peptide Synthesis Reactions.Life (Basel, Switzerland) · 2022Article
- From amino acid mixtures to peptides in liquid sulphur dioxide on early Earth.Nature communications · 2021Article
- The Prebiotic Kitchen: A Guide to Composing Prebiotic Soup Recipes to Test Origins of Life Hypotheses.Life (Basel, Switzerland) · 2021Review
- Automated Exploration of Prebiotic Chemical Reaction Space: Progress and Perspectives.Life (Basel, Switzerland) · 2021Review
- The role of borosilicate glass in Miller-Urey experiment.Scientific reports · 2021Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
10 authors at 2 institutions in 2 countries.
Funding
Abstract
Many approaches to the origin of life focus on how the molecules found in biology might be made in the absence of biological processes, from the simplest plausible starting materials. Another approach could be to view the emergence of the chemistry of biology as process whereby the environment effectively directs "primordial soups" toward structure, function, and genetic systems over time. This does not require the molecules found in biology today to be made initially, and leads to the hypothesis that environment can direct chemical soups toward order, and eventually living systems. Herein, we show how unconstrained condensation reactions can be steered by changes in the reaction environment, such as order of reactant addition, and addition of salts or minerals. Using omics techniques to survey the resulting chemical ensembles we demonstrate there are distinct, significant, and reproducible differences between the product mixtures. Furthermore, we observe that these differences in composition have consequences, manifested in clearly different structural and functional properties. We demonstrate that simple variations in environmental parameters lead to differentiation of distinct chemical ensembles from both amino acid mixtures and a primordial soup model. We show that the synthetic complexity emerging from such unconstrained reactions is not as intractable as often suggested, when viewed through a chemically agnostic lens. An open approach to complexity can generate compositional, structural, and functional diversity from fixed sets of simple starting materials, suggesting that differentiation of chemical ensembles can occur in the wider environment without the need for biological machinery.
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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.