Recent work, from a team led by Juan Pérez-Mercader, brought those explanations one step closer by recreating the conditions present on early Earth where life first appeared. Our study, just published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, uncovers an exhilarating find. It’s an example of how a robust, self-replicating system can spontaneously come together from non-biological molecules. Dimitar Sasselov, principal investigator for the Origins of Life Initiative and Phillips Professor of Astronomy, celebrates this paper as an important breakthrough in piecing together the puzzle of how life first began on Earth.
Pérez-Mercader, a “77-year-old kid” as he described himself, put his team through an equally-fascinating experiment. As proof of concept, they mixed four carbon-based, non-biochemical molecules with water in glass vials. These vials, glowing under the yellow-green light of their LED bulbs, were a straight-gloved twist on Charles Darwin’s hypothetical “warm little pond.” The demonstration was an example of polymerization-induced self-assembly, where initially disordered nanoparticles formed themselves into intricate architectures.
This clever approach yielded a self-replicating vesicular system that builds in loose heritable variation. This mechanism models aspects of Darwinian evolution, providing a plausible model for how life might have originated approximately 4 billion years ago. The oldest evidence of life, microscopic fossils of primitive bacteria, goes back almost that far, to around 3.8 billion years.
Charles Darwin notoriously conjectured that life started in a nutrient-rich, warm soup only to give rise to an array of intricately different species over time. In the 1950s, scientists Stanley Miller and Harold Urey produced conditions resembling primordial Earth. Their experiments ultimately produced amino acids and laid the groundwork for explaining and exploring the origins of life. Pérez-Mercader’s research continues in this spirit, looking to understand how life might develop from more rudimentary systems.
Stephen P. Fletcher, a professor of chemistry at the University of Oxford, expressed the importance of this research in a statement. He thinks it opens the door for engineering synthetic, self-reproducing systems. In addition to testifying to the significance of understanding life’s origins, these findings could suggest pathways for future research in synthetic biology.
In the 1990s, Dimitar Sasselov made a radical career move — he decided to study astrobiology. He subsequently founded Madrid’s Centro de Astrobiología, joining forces with NASA to do so. His grounding in initiatives like this one exemplifies the benefit of cross-disciplinary efforts to answer the biggest questions about how life began.