Modeling free energy availability from Hadean hydrothermal systems to the first metabolism

A Hydrothermal-Sedimentary Context for the Origin of Life

Critical to the origin of life are the ingredients of life, of course, but also the physical and chemical conditions in which prebiotic chemical reactions can take place. These factors place constraints on the types of Hadean environment in which life could have emerged. Many locations, ranging from hydrothermal vents and pumice rafts, through volcanic-hosted splash pools to continental springs and rivers, have been proposed for the emergence of life on Earth, each with respective advantages and certain disadvantages. However, there is another, hitherto unrecognized environment that, on the Hadean Earth (4.5-4.0 Ga), would have been more important than any other in terms of spatial and temporal scale: the sedimentary layer between oceanic crust and seawater. Using as an example sediments from the 3.5-3.33 Ga Barberton Greenstone Belt, South Africa, analogous at least on a local scale to those of the Hadean eon, we document constant permeation of the porous, carbonaceous, and reactive sedimentary layer by hydrothermal fluids emanating from the crust. This partially UV-protected, subaqueous sedimentary environment, characterized by physical and chemical gradients, represented a widespread system of miniature chemical reactors in which the production and complexification of prebiotic molecules could have led to the origin of life. Key Words: Origin of life-Hadean environment-Mineral surface reactions-Hydrothermal fluids-Archean volcanic sediments. Astrobiology 18, 259-293.

The drive to life on wet and icy worlds

This paper presents a reformulation of the submarine alkaline hydrothermal theory for the emergence of life in response to recent experimental findings. The theory views life, like other self-organizing systems in the Universe, as an inevitable outcome of particular disequilibria. In this case, the disequilibria were two: (1) in redox potential, between hydrogen plus methane with the circuit-completing electron acceptors such as nitrite, nitrate, ferric iron, and carbon dioxide, and (2) in pH gradient between an acidulous external ocean and an alkaline hydrothermal fluid. Both CO2 and CH4 were equally the ultimate sources of organic carbon, and the metal sulfides and oxyhydroxides acted as protoenzymatic catalysts. The realization, now 50 years old, that membrane-spanning gradients, rather than organic intermediates, play a vital role in life's operations calls into question the idea of "prebiotic chemistry." It informs our own suggestion that experimentation should look to the kind of nanoengines that must have been the precursors to molecular motors-such as pyrophosphate synthetase and the like driven by these gradients-that make life work. It is these putative free energy or disequilibria converters, presumably constructed from minerals comprising the earliest inorganic membranes, that, as obstacles to vectorial ionic flows, present themselves as the candidates for future experiments. Key Words: Methanotrophy-Origin of life. Astrobiology 14, 308-343. The fixation of inorganic carbon into organic material (autotrophy) is a prerequisite for life and sets the starting point of biological evolution. (Fuchs, 2011 ) Further significant progress with the tightly membrane-bound H(+)-PPase family should lead to an increased insight into basic requirements for the biological transport of protons through membranes and its coupling to phosphorylation. (Baltscheffsky et al., 1999 ).

From cytoplasm to environment: the inorganic ingredients for the origin of life

Early in its history, Earth's surface developed from an uninhabitable magma ocean to a place where life could emerge. The first organisms, lacking ion transporters, fixed the composition of their cradle environment in their intracellular fluid. Later, though life adapted and spread, it preserved some qualities of its initial environment within. Modern prokaryotes could thus provide insights into the conditions of early Earth and the requirements for the emergence of life. In this work, we constrain Earth's life-forming environment through detailed analysis of prokaryotic intracellular fluid. Rigorous assessment of the constraints placed on the early Earth environment by intracellular liquid will provide insight into the conditions of abiogenesis, with implications not only for our understanding of early Earth but also the formation of life elsewhere in the Universe.

Turnstiles and bifurcators: the disequilibrium converting engines that put metabolism on the road

The Submarine Hydrothermal Alkaline Spring Theory for the emergence of life holds that it is the ordered delivery of hydrogen and methane in alkaline hydrothermal solutions at a spontaneously precipitated inorganic osmotic and catalytic membrane to the carbon dioxide and other electron acceptors in the earliest acidulous cool ocean that, through these gradients, drove life into being. That such interactions between hydrothermal fuels and potential oxidants have so far not been accomplished in the lab is because some steps along the necessary metabolic pathways are endergonic and must therefore be driven by being coupled to thermodynamically larger exergonic processes. But coupling of this kind is far from automatic and it is not enough to merely sum the ΔGs of two supposedly coupled reactions and show their combined thermodynamic viability. An exergonic reaction will not drive an endergonic one unless 'forced' to do so by being tied to it mechanistically via an organized "engine" of "Free Energy Conversion" (FEC). Here we discuss the thermodynamics of FEC and advance proposals regarding the nature and roles of the FEC devices that could, in principle, have arisen spontaneously in the alkaline hydrothermal context and have forced the onset of a protometabolism. The key challenge is to divine what these initial engines of life were in physicochemical terms and as part of that, what structures provided the first "turnstile-like" mechanisms needed to couple the partner processes in free energy conversion; in particular to couple the dissipation of geochemically given gradients to, say, the reduction of CO(2) to formate and the generation of a pyrophosphate disequilibrium. This article is part of a Special Issue entitled: The evolutionary aspects of bioenergetic systems.

Enhanced photocatalytic performance of ZnS for reversible amination of α-oxo acids by hydrothermal treatment

To understand how life could have originated on early Earth, it is essential to know what biomolecules and metabolic pathways are shared by extant organisms and what organic compounds and their chemical reaction channels were likely to have been primordially available during the initial phase of the formation of prebiotic metabolism. In a previous study, we demonstrated for the first time the reversible amination of α-oxo acids on the surface of photo-illuminated ZnS. The sulfide mineral is a typical component at the periphery of submarine hydrothermal vents which has been frequently argued as a very attractive venue for the origin of life. In this work, in order to simulate more closely the precipitation environments of ZnS in the vent systems, we treated newly-precipitated ZnS with hydrothermal conditions and found that its photocatalytic power was significantly enhanced because the relative crystallinity of the treated sample was markedly increased with increasing temperature. Since the reported experimental conditions are believed to have been prevalent in shallow-water hydrothermal vents of early Earth and the reversible amination of α-oxo acids is a key metabolic pathway in all extant life forms, the results of this work provide a prototypical model of the prebiotic amino acid redox metabolism. The amino acid dehydrogenase-like chemistry on photo-irradiated ZnS surfaces may advance our understanding of the establishment of archaic non-enzymatic metabolic systems.