Chandru, Kuhan, Nicholas Guttenberg, Chaitanya Giri, Yayoi Hongo, Christopher Butch, Irena Mamajanov, and H. James Cleaves. “Simple prebiotic synthesis of high diversity dynamic combinatorial polyester libraries.” Communications Chemistry 1, no. 1 (2018): 1-8.
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It is widely believed that the origin of life depended on environmentally driven complexification of abiotically produced organic compounds. Polymerization is one type of such complexification, and it may be important that many diverse polymer sequences be produced for the sake of selection. Not all compound classes are easily polymerized under the environmental conditions present on primitive planets, and it is possible that life’s origin was aided by other monomers besides those used in contemporary biochemistry. Here we show that alpha-hydroxy acids, which are plausibly abundant prebiotic monomers, can be oligomerized to generate vast, likely sequence-complete libraries, which are also stable for significant amounts of time. This occurs over a variety of reaction conditions (temperature, concentration, salinity, and presence of congeners) compatible with geochemical settings on the primitive Earth and other solar system environments. The high-sequence heterogeneity achievable with these compounds may be useful for scaffolding the origin of life.