ArticleScientific reports2020
Prebiotic oligomerization and self-assembly of structurally diverse xenobiological monomers.
Article in Scientific reports, 2020. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 14 papers.
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Who cites it
14 citing papers in PubMed, 32 citations in OpenAlex.
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- Probing the Limits of Reactant Concentration and Volume in Primitive Polyphenyllactate Synthesis and Microdroplet Assembly Processes.ACS bio & med chem Au · 2025Article
- Flipons and the origin of the genetic code.Biology letters · 2025Article
- The interplay between peptides and RNA is critical for protoribosome compartmentalization and stability.Nucleic acids research · 2024Article
- Solvent constraints for biopolymer folding and evolution in extraterrestrial environments.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2024Article
- Recent progress in primitive polyester synthesis and membraneless microdroplet assembly.Biophysics and physicobiology · 2023Article
- Spontaneous Formation of Functional Structures in Messy Environments.Life (Basel, Switzerland) · 2022Article
- Thioesters provide a plausible prebiotic path to proto-peptides.Nature communications · 2022Article
- Differential Oligomerization of Alpha versus Beta Amino Acids and Hydroxy Acids in Abiotic Proto-Peptide Synthesis Reactions.Life (Basel, Switzerland) · 2022Article
- Sequencing the origins of life.BBA advances · 2022Review
- 'Whole Organism', Systems Biology, and Top-Down Criteria for Evaluating Scenarios for the Origin of Life.Life (Basel, Switzerland) · 2021Review
- Connecting primitive phase separation to biotechnology, synthetic biology, and engineering.Journal of biosciences · 2021Review
- Increasing complexity of primitive compartments.Biophysics and physicobiology · 2021Article
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Authors and funding
5 authors at 2 institutions in 5 countries.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Prebiotic chemists often study how modern biopolymers, e.g., peptides and nucleic acids, could have originated in the primitive environment, though most contemporary biomonomers don't spontaneously oligomerize under mild conditions without activation or catalysis. However, life may not have originated using the same monomeric components that it does presently. There may be numerous non-biological (or "xenobiological") monomer types that were prebiotically abundant and capable of facile oligomerization and self-assembly. Many modern biopolymers degrade abiotically preferentially via processes which produce thermodynamically stable ring structures, e.g. diketopiperazines in the case of proteins and 2', 3'-cyclic nucleotide monophosphates in the case of RNA. This weakness is overcome in modern biological systems by kinetic control, but this need not have been the case for primitive systems. We explored here the oligomerization of a structurally diverse set of prebiotically plausible xenobiological monomers, which can hydrolytically interconvert between cyclic and acyclic forms, alone or in the presence of glycine under moderate temperature drying conditions. These monomers included various lactones, lactams and a thiolactone, which varied markedly in their stability, propensity to oligomerize and apparent modes of initiation, and the oligomeric products of some of these formed self-organized microscopic structures which may be relevant to protocell formation.
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