AI Summary
The study suggests that a compound essential for all living things, pantetheine, could have played a role in the origin of life on Earth. The researchers were able to synthesize pantetheine in lab conditions resembling those on early Earth, using molecules formed from hydrogen cyanide. This challenges the belief that water is too destructive for life to originate in it. The compound could have aided in chemical reactions leading to the formation of early living organisms.
A chemical compound essential to all living things has been synthesized in a lab in conditions that could have occurred on early Earth, suggesting it played a role at the outset of life, finds a new study led by University College London researchers.
The compound, pantetheine, is the active fragment of Coenzyme A. It is important for metabolism—the chemical processes that maintain life. Earlier studies failed to synthesize pantetheine effectively, leading to suggestions that it was absent at life’s origin.
In the new study, published in the journal Science, the research team created the compound in water at room temperature using molecules formed from hydrogen cyanide, which was likely abundant on early Earth.
Once formed, the researchers said, it is simple to envisage how pantetheine might have aided chemical reactions that led from simple forerunners of protein and RNA molecules to the first living organisms—a moment that is thought to have occurred 4 billion years ago.
The study challenges the view among some researchers in the field that water is too destructive for life to originate in it and that life more likely originated in pools that periodically dried out.
Driving the reactions that produced pantetheine were energy-rich molecules called aminonitriles, which are closely chemically related to amino acids, the building blocks of proteins and of life.
Members of the same team, led by Professor Matthew Powner (UCL Chemistry), have