ON THE THEORETICAL AND EXPERIMENTAL MODELING OF INITIAL STAGES OF METABOLISM FORMATION IN PREBIOTIC SYSTEMS

Abstract

Recently searching for extraterrestrial life attracts more and more attention However the searching hardly can be effective without sufficiently universal concept of life origin which incidentally tackles a problem of origin of life on the Earth A concept of initial stages of life origin including origin of prebiotic metabolism is stated in the paper Suggested concept eliminates key difficulties in the problem of life origin and allows experimental verification of it According to the concept the predecessor of living beings has to be sufficiently simple to provide non-zero probability of self-assembling during short in geological or cosmic scale time In addition the predecessor has to be capable of autocatalysis and further complication evolution A possible scenario of initial stage of life origin which can be realized both on other planets and inside experimental facility is considered In the scope of the scenario a theoretical model of multivariate oligomeric autocatalyst coupled with phase-separated particle is presented Results of computer simulation of possible initial stage of chemical evolution are shown Conducted estimations show the origin of autocatalytic oligomeric phase-separated system is possible at reasonable values of kinetic parameters of involved chemical reactions in a small-scale flow reactor Accepted statements allowing to eliminate key problems of life origin imply important consequence -- organisms emerged out of the Earth or inside a reactor have to be based on another different from terrestrial biochemical