AI Article Synopsis
- The secular debate about the origin of life is a major challenge for scientists, with chemistry playing a key role in understanding how simple organic molecules formed on early Earth.
- Amino acids are vital for biological processes, have been successfully created in lab simulations of primitive Earth conditions, and have also been detected in meteorites.
- Our computational study of over 100,000 natural amino acid structures shows that these amino acids are among the most thermodynamically stable, making them likely candidates for synthesis in prebiotic conditions.
Article Abstract
The secular debate on the origin of life on our planet represents one of the open challenges for the scientific community. In this endeavour, chemistry has a pivotal role in disclosing novel scenarios that allow us to understand how the formation of simple organic molecules would be possible in the early primitive geological ages of Earth. Amino acids play a crucial role in biological processes. They are known to be formed in experiments simulating primitive conditions and were found in meteoric samples retrieved throughout the years. Understanding their formation is a key step for prebiotic chemistry. Following this reasoning, we performed a computational investigation over 100'000 structural isomers of natural amino acids. The results we have found suggest that natural amino acids are among the most thermodynamically stable structures and, therefore, one of the most probable ones to be synthesised among their possible isomers.
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| http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s11084-021-09615-2 | DOI Listing |
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