Aristotle considered that “nature does not do anything endless”. Today, despite the enormous scientific achievements reached in the field of the applied science, such as medicine, biology, engineering, physics and chemistry, many question marks accompany the life of scientists. Mankind has always asked one question “where do we come from? How could life have emerged from an inanimate collection of organic molecules, minerals and water?” International scientific figures, often chemists, who believe that life emerged spontaneously from a mixture of molecules in a prebiotic land agree that studies on the spontaneous origin of life are needed [1–3]. Molecular biology is undergoing a transformation, moving from studying cellular processes as they currently are; both basic understanding (analytical approach) and hypothesis testing by a constructive procedure (synthetic approach), using artificial models. This second route, which complements the first one, requires a degree of understanding that is ultimately based on chemistry and physics—this is why we say, “from the bottom”. For example, building artificial analogues of biochemical processes reveals whether we have really understood how a system works or whether we fail because something is still missing (according to the motto: “What I cannot create, I do not understand”, by the Nobel Prize winning physicist Richard Feynman). “Biology today is no more fully understood in principle than physics was a century or so ago. In both cases the guiding vision has (or had) reached its end, and in both, a new, deeper, more invigorating representation of reality is (or was) called for”. The late biologist Carl Richard Woese (1928–2012) emphasized the urgency of conducting in-depth studies in search of what in the early days of the formation of the universe and then of our planet gave rise to what is called life [4]. In 2005, the term “Systems Chemistry” appeared in a conference on Prebiotic Chemistry and Early Evolution (Chembiogenesis 2005 in Venice, Italy). This field of chemical research has its roots in a number of different areas such as dynamic combinatorial chemistry, self-assembly and self-organization, prebiotic chemistry, minimal self-replicating molecules, metabolic and non-metabolic networks and autocatalytic systems. In few words, systems chemistry is the science of studying the networks of interacting molecules to form new functions from a set of molecular components at different hierarchical levels with emergent properties. The goal now is to understand, perhaps from experimental reproduction, the formation of a compartmentalized chemical system far from thermodynamic equilibrium, a system which is kinetically stable and can self-maintain (metabolism), dynamically evolve and is capable of dividing/self-reproducing, which we then could call “alive” or “animate”, according to one of the definition of life proposed in the literature in 2005 [5].
The Origin and Early Evolution of Life: (Prebiotic) Systems Chemistry Perspective
E. AltamuraWriting – Original Draft Preparation
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2022-01-01
Abstract
Aristotle considered that “nature does not do anything endless”. Today, despite the enormous scientific achievements reached in the field of the applied science, such as medicine, biology, engineering, physics and chemistry, many question marks accompany the life of scientists. Mankind has always asked one question “where do we come from? How could life have emerged from an inanimate collection of organic molecules, minerals and water?” International scientific figures, often chemists, who believe that life emerged spontaneously from a mixture of molecules in a prebiotic land agree that studies on the spontaneous origin of life are needed [1–3]. Molecular biology is undergoing a transformation, moving from studying cellular processes as they currently are; both basic understanding (analytical approach) and hypothesis testing by a constructive procedure (synthetic approach), using artificial models. This second route, which complements the first one, requires a degree of understanding that is ultimately based on chemistry and physics—this is why we say, “from the bottom”. For example, building artificial analogues of biochemical processes reveals whether we have really understood how a system works or whether we fail because something is still missing (according to the motto: “What I cannot create, I do not understand”, by the Nobel Prize winning physicist Richard Feynman). “Biology today is no more fully understood in principle than physics was a century or so ago. In both cases the guiding vision has (or had) reached its end, and in both, a new, deeper, more invigorating representation of reality is (or was) called for”. The late biologist Carl Richard Woese (1928–2012) emphasized the urgency of conducting in-depth studies in search of what in the early days of the formation of the universe and then of our planet gave rise to what is called life [4]. In 2005, the term “Systems Chemistry” appeared in a conference on Prebiotic Chemistry and Early Evolution (Chembiogenesis 2005 in Venice, Italy). This field of chemical research has its roots in a number of different areas such as dynamic combinatorial chemistry, self-assembly and self-organization, prebiotic chemistry, minimal self-replicating molecules, metabolic and non-metabolic networks and autocatalytic systems. In few words, systems chemistry is the science of studying the networks of interacting molecules to form new functions from a set of molecular components at different hierarchical levels with emergent properties. The goal now is to understand, perhaps from experimental reproduction, the formation of a compartmentalized chemical system far from thermodynamic equilibrium, a system which is kinetically stable and can self-maintain (metabolism), dynamically evolve and is capable of dividing/self-reproducing, which we then could call “alive” or “animate”, according to one of the definition of life proposed in the literature in 2005 [5].I documenti in IRIS sono protetti da copyright e tutti i diritti sono riservati, salvo diversa indicazione.
