Plausible Emergence and Self Assembly of a Primitive Phospholipid from Reduced Phosphorus on the Primordial Earth.

How life arose on the primitive Earth is one of the biggest questions in science. Biomolecular emergence scenarios have proliferated in the literature but accounting for the ubiquity of oxidized (+ 5) phosphate (PO) in extant biochemistries has been challenging due to the dearth of phosphate and molecular oxygen on the primordial Earth. A compelling body of work suggests that exogenous schreibersite ((Fe,Ni)P) was delivered to Earth via meteorite impacts during the Heavy Bombardment (ca.