MAMAJANOV, IRENA. “From Messy Chemistry to the Origins of Life.” LPI Contributions 2134 (2019): 1047.
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In the last 65 years, prebiotic chemistry has been explored in many plausible Early Earth conditions. Biological building blocks have been discovered in the Miller-Urey experiment and at high pressure and temperature in geothermal vent conditions. Some biomolecules have been generated by HCN chemistry and in FischerTropsch-type reactions. Additionally, interesting “life-like properties” such as functioning autocatalysis and self-assembling nucleoside analogs have been discovered in formose reaction and cyanuric acidtriaminopyrimidine coupling, respectively. Many of these prebiotic systems share a common feature – they are messy. The systems produce vast multicomponent mixtures of compounds through an abundance of reaction pathways. When messy prebiotic systems reach steady state or equilibrium, they produce heterogeneous intractable polymeric structures, dubbed “tar” or “asphalt”.