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Abstract

Deep oceans were thought to hold life's origins. New evidence points instead to an active volcanic landscape
28 Scientific American, August 2017
the new origins of
life
springs
CHEMISTRY
Deep oceans
were thought to
hold lifes origins.
New evidence
points instead
toan active
volcanic landscape
By Martin J. Van
Kranendonk,
David W. Deamer
and Tara Djokic
August 2017, ScientificAmerican.com 29
BIRTHING POOL: Life on Earth
could have started in places similar
to the Grand Prismatic Spring
in Yellowstone National Park.
30 Scientific American, August 2017
PRECEDING PAGES: WERNER VAN STEEN Getty Images
Heading up the side of the creek embankment,
Djokic suddenly stumbles back downhill. Has she lost
her balance? To stop her from falling, Van Kranendonk
reaches out to stop her and pushes her back uphill,
which prompts a screech, something unintelligible, and
finally a sputtered cry: “Sp- .. . p- . . . p- . . . pppider!”
Djokic has not stumbled at all. She is in flight mode, in
fear for her life as she tries to swat away the thick spi-
der web enveloping her. Spiders have a deservedly bad
reputation in Australia. In the dark, it is not a good idea
to assume that you have found the odd benignspecies.
The reason we are feeling our way around the Pilba-
ra at night is because we had spent the day enthralled by
a new discovery Djokic had made in 3.48-billion-year-old
sedimentary rocks called the Dresser Formation. Some
of the rocks are wrinkled orange and white layers, called
geyserite, which were created by a volcanic geyser on
Earth’s surface. They revealed bubbles formed when gas
was trapped in a sticky film, most likely produced by a
thin layer of bacterialike microorganisms. The surface
rocks and indications of biofilms support a new idea
about one of the oldest mysteries on the planet: how and
where life got started. The evidence pointed to volcanic
hot springs and pools, on land, about 3.5billion years ago.
This is a far dierent picture of life’s origins from
the one scientists have been sketching since 1977. That
was the year the research submarine Alvin discovered
hydrothermal vents at the bottom of the Pacific Ocean
pumping out minerals containing iron and sulfur and
gases such as methane and hydrogen sulfide, surround-
ed by primitive bacteria and large worms. It was a
thriving ecosystem. Biologists have since theorized that
such vents, protected from the cataclysms wracking
Earth’s surface about four billion years ago, could have
provided the energy, nutrients and a safe haven for life
to begin. But the theory has problems. The big one is
that the ocean has a lot of water, and in it the needed
molecules might spread out too quickly to interact and
form cell membranes and primitive metabolisms.
Now we and others believe land pools that repeated-
ly dry out and then get wet again could be much better
places. The pools have heat to catalyze reactions, dry
I -.          
northwestern Australia, guided only by the dim light from a GPS screen. The light is
too weak to reveal fallen trees that fill the dry creek bed we are following, and we keep
tripping over them. We are two geologists working in a remote region of the country
known as the Pilbara: Djokic up front and Van Kranendonk several steps behind. Our
truck, parked somewhere on a small plateau, seems a world away. We are not sure if
the GPS’s batteries will hold out long enough to show us the way back. The night sky,
ablaze with countless stars visible right down to the horizon, twinkles in an amazing spectacle
as Jupiter dances with nearby Venus. Sadly, this spectacle provides little navigational help for
two scientists fumbling their way through the Australian outback in June 2014.
Martin J. Van Kr anendonk is di rector of the Austr alian
Center for A strobiology in t he School of Biologi cal, Earth
and Environ mental Sciences a t the University of New S outh
Wales. He has co nducted researc h for more than 30 years
in extrem ely old rocks acros s the planet.
Tara Djokic is a Ph.D. candi date at the Australia n Center
for Astro biology at the Univer sity of New South Wales .
Her projec t combines geolog ic observations of e arly evidence
of life in Western A ustralia with vir tual-reality tec hnology.
IN BRIEF
To get started, life on Earth needed energy to cre-
ate complex molecules and ways to bring these
molecules together.
A system of volcanic pools and hot springs on land
has the needed ingredients for life and wet-dry cy-
cles for interaction and natural selection.
A land-based volcanic origins theory, in contr ast to
an ocean-focused one, guides us to dierent places
in the solar s ystem to search for life th ere.
David Deamer is a faculty member in t he department
of biomolec ular engineering at t he University of C alifornia,
Santa C ruz. He is author or ed itor of 12 books, inc luding
The Origins of L ife (2010), co-e dited with Jack W. Szostak , and
First Life (2011), publis hed by the Universit y of California Press .
August 2017, ScientificAmerican.com 31
COURTESY OF MARTIN J. VAN KRANENDONK
spells in which complex molecules called polymers can
be formed from simpler units, wet spells that float
these polymers around, and further drying periods that
maroon them in tiny cavities where they can interact
and even become concentrated in compartments of fat-
ty acids—the prototypes of cellmembranes.
What Djokic found was strong geologic evidence
that the Dresser, now a dry, hot and barren outback en-
vironment, had once been like the steaming pools and
erupting geysers of Yellowstone National Park in the
U.S., an active geothermal field. And everywhere in the
Dresser there are fossilized signs of life intimately asso-
ciated with the old hot spring system. Although the
Dresser was not the actual site where the most primi-
tive life began half a billion years earlier, it was show-
ing us that hydrothermal environments on land were
present very early in Earth’s history. Charles Darwin
had suggested, back in 1871, that microbial life origi-
nated in “some warm little pond.” A number of scien-
tists from dierent fields now think that the author of
On the Origin of Species had intuitively hit on some-
thing important. And the implications of these ideas
stretch beyond our own planet: in our search for alien
life elsewhere in the solar system, a land-based theory
about origins would guide us to dierent places and
planets than would an ocean-based theory.
FROM RUSSIA WITH LIFE
   Djokic’s run-in with the spider web,
another of us (Deamer) had shown that volcanic pools
could foster the assembly of compartments made of
membranes, essential boundaries of all cellular life.
Deam er led a group of scientists to Mutnovsky, an ac-
tive volcano in the Kamchatka peninsula of far eastern
Russia. The group was exploring a prebiotic analogue
site, a region that can give researchers a sense of what
the planet was like four billion years ago, before life be-
gan. Deamer’s idea was that simple molecular building
blocks might join into longer information-carrying
polymers like nucleic acids—needed for primitive life
to grow and replicate—when exposed to the wet-dry cy-
cles characteristic of land-based hot springs. Other key
polymers, peptides, might form from amino acids un-
der the same conditions. Crucially, still other building
blocks called lipids might assemble into microscopic
compartments to house and protect the information-
carrying polymers. Life would need all the compounds
to get started, and Mutnovsky had an abundance of hot
springs and geysers in which the idea could betested.
Deamer had brought a bottle of white powder con-
taining raw material that was likely available on the
prebiotic Earth, including four amino acids and four
chemical bases that compose naturally occurring nu-
cleic acids, as well as phosphate, glycerol and a lipid.
He poured this mixture into the center of a small, boil-
ing spring. Within minutes a white, frothy foam
emerged around the spring’s edges. The foam was com-
posed of countless tiny vesicles, each containing com-
pounds that were present in the originalsoup.
If the compartments dried out around the edges of
the puddle, could their contents, already in close prox-
imity, join together as polymers? Could this be a step-
ping-stone to the first life? Back in his laboratory, Deam-
er and his colleagues tested the idea by mixing simple
nucleic acids called nucleotides with lipids. The mix-
ture was put through cycles of wetting and drying un-
der the acidic conditions and high temperatures found
in the Kamchatka pool. The result: longer polymers
ranging from 10 to more than 100 nucleotides in length.
Later studies using x-ray diraction demonstrated the
polymers resembled ribonucleic acid, or RNA. Further-
more, these polymers were encapsulated by the lipids
to form vast numbers of microscopic compartments
LIFE ON THE
ROCKS: Orange
rocks in Austra-
lia’s Pilbara re -
gion are called
geyserite, com-
posed of miner-
als splashing
from geysers in
hot springs (1).
The rocks show
signature dark
bands rich in
titanium and
light bands com-
posed largely
of potassium in
a microscopic
view (one centi-
meter in width)
(2). Minuscule
bubbles pre-
served in this
3.5-billion-year-
old geyserite
were formed in
sticky biolms,
the products
of bio logical
organ isms (3).
1
2
3
called protocells. Though not alive, they were clearly
an important step towardlife.
Deamer used just a few wet-dry cycles in his experi-
ments and got relatively simple molecules. A colleague
of his at the University of California, Santa Cruz, com-
puter scientist Bruce Damer, suspected that many more
cycles might add another key feature: the survival of
the fittest. Each drying cycle, Damer figured, would
cause lipid membranes of the vesicles to open, allowing
polymers and nutrients to mix. On rewetting, the lipid
membranes would reencapsulate dierent mixtures of
polymers, each mixture representing a kind of natural
experiment. More complex protocells would have bet-
ter chances of survival because their greater variety of
molecular mixtures might stabilize the protocells in
various conditions—one set of molecules helping in one
set of surroundings, another helping in a dierent set.
These intact protocells would then survive to pass on
these polymer sets to the next generation, climbing an
evolutionary ladder. Damer realized that this model re-
sembled a kind of chemical computer “booting up” the
functions of life, starting with random “programs” writ-
ten in the form of polymers.
In 2015 Damer added a third phase to the two-part
cycle: an intermediate stage between wet and dry.
The idea occurred during a field trip with the co-au-
thors to the Dresser Formation in search of stromato-
lites, which are the fossilized layers of bacterial mats
and some of the earliest evidence of life on Earth.
Damer was walking through the desert near a granite
outcrop known as Gallery Hill that is covered with
Aboriginal rock carvings known as petroglyphs.
On the way, he noticed brown, dried-up micro-
bial mats in small depressions in the outcrops.
Out of curiosity, Damer poured water on the
mats, and they sprung back to life, becoming
green and gel-like. He realized that if wet-dry
cycles in an origin pool also included a moist
phase, in which surviving protocells crowd togeth-
er into a similar gel, polymers and nutrient mole-
cules could mix and exchange across the barriers of
lipid membranes. This community of cooperating
protocells would have even more opportunities to find
the best molecules for survival. Forty years earlier, in
fact, scientists George Fox and the late Carl Woese
proposed the term “progenote” for such a communal
primordial phase of life; Fox told Damer this matched
his protocell gel.
POOLS OF INNOVATION
    composition that Djokic
found in the Dresser Formation made it a likely spot for
the three-part cycle to occur, and we published the ev-
idence this past May in Nature Communications. After
we realized that the Dresser had been filled with sur-
face hot springs in a geothermal system, it became
clear that it also had contained many of the key ingre-
dients and organizational structures required for the
origin of life. It had a source of energy in the form of
Genesis Landscape
Hot springs, pools and geysers can kick-start chemical systems
necessary for life on Earth to begin, according to one theory.
The conditions set in motion seven steps, beginning with chemical
synthesis, moving through cycles of increasing complexity and
ending in colonization of new territory.
Synthesis
Many of life’s basic
building blocks, such as
amino acids , are formed
in space and fa ll to Earth.
1 Accumulation
In-falling organic
compounds, along with
others generated within
hot springs on a vo lcanic
landscape, accumulate
in hydrothermal pools.
2
32 Scientific American, August 2017
August 2017, ScientificAmerican.com 33
Films
Films
Gels
Progenotes
Protocells
Protocells
Wet
Dry
Increasing complexity
Gel phase
Distribution
The best-adapted proto-
cells spread t o other
pools or str eams, moving
by wind and wate r, and
some develop the ability
to use carb on dioxide for
photosynthe sis. After
much trial an d error, one
protocell as sembles the
compli cated molecular
machin ery that en ables it
to divide into daughter
cells. This p aves the way
for the rs t livin g micro 
bial community.
5
Adaptation
Some of these early
microbes are pushed
into saltwater estuaries,
beyond their native
freshwater ponds. The
microbes that survive
pass along useful traits
that help descen dants
expand their range
to oceans .
6
Colonization
Sea storm s and tugging
tides sele ct for mats of
rugged microbes able
to cement themselves
together using grains
of minerals. These layers
pile up into st acks called
stromatolites. Life con-
tinues to expand into
other niches, setting the
stage for f ree-living cells.
After bil lions of years,
these organisms evolve
into com plex multicellular
plants and animals.
7
Organic com-
pounds, some
forming mem-
branes, collect
in pools.
a
b
Membranes dry
to fo rm lms .
Between these
layers, simpl e
organic building
blocks bond
together to
form polymers.
Protocells that survive
the changing conditions
then group to gether in a moi st
gel as the poo l level drops.
When the pool
rells, the lms
rehydrate and
bud o trillions
of protocells,
membranes
that encapsulate
collections of
random polymers.
d
c
The cycle repeats, again and
again. Ever y time it does,
protocells interact, compete
for re sources and evolve
more complex functional
poly mers until a “proge-
note” community
emerges that is able
to exchange adap tive
molecules, develop-
ing ever more sop his-
ticated functions.
e
Cycling
Pools go through
repeated c ycles of three
phases: dr y, wet and
moist gels. Dry times
help to synt hesize poly-
mers used to c arry infor-
mation, such as chains
of nucleic aci ds. In a wet
period, protocells can
form, encapsulating
these poly mers and pro-
tectin g them. Then, in
the gel phas e, protocells
pack toget her in a system
called a pro genote and
exchange set s of poly-
mers, selecting those
that enhance survival
during many cycles.
4
3 Concentration
The compounds are
concentrated within tiny
vesicles made of simple
molecules called lipids.
The close proximity, plus
heat and chemical energy
from the spring system,
links them together
to form more co mplex
molecular chains.
Illustration by José Miguel Mayo (landscape) and Jen Christiansen (cycling detail)
34 Scientific American, August 2017
THEO ALLOFS Getty Images
circulating hydrothermal fluids, rich in hydrogen, heat-
ed by magma from below. The rocks contained abun-
dant amounts of the element boron, a crucial ingredi-
ent in the synthesis of ribose necessary for nucleic ac-
ids such as RNA. The Dresser also has phosphate
minerals that dissolve out of the underlying rocks and
join circulating acidic geothermal fluids. Phosphate is
an important component of nucleic acids, but it is also
used by all life in the form of ATP (adenosine triphos-
phate, the molecule that supplies energy within cells).
In addition, there were high concentrations of zinc and
manganese, components of many enzymes in the cyto-
plasm of cells from all known branches of life, found in
hydrothermal vents and in evaporative volcanic lake
deposits. Finally, the Dresser also had clays, which can
function as catalysts for creating complex organic mol-
ecules because of the electrically charged layers of min-
eral surfaces theycontain.
Perhaps the most exciting thing about the Dresser
as an origin analogue site is its amazing variety be-
cause in this field of science, variety is very much the
spice of life. The Dresser is dry and rocky now, but in
their youth, geothermal hot spring fields such as this
one contain many hundreds of pools, each with a
slightly dierent pH, temperature, dissolved ions and
other chemical variations. Chemical complexity is rich
in such fields because they contain three highly reac-
tive interfaces—between water and rock, water and air,
and rock and air. The fields also have dierent temper-
atures at dierent spots. Multiply all of this together:
the wetting-drying cycles happening multiple times
each day (think Old Faithful in Yellowstone), variable
Journey to a Land across Time
When I rst set foot in Western Australia’s Pilbara, a landscape
holding 3.5-billion-year-old clues to the beginning of life, I was
very disappointed. The year was 1994. I drove excitedly out of the
wes t coast tow n of Port Hedla nd , but all I saw for the rs t 15 0 kilo-
meters were a few withered, scraggly trees and smoky dust devils
traipsing across the burnt, at plain. I felt desolated. What had I
gotten myself into? And the heat!! I’d never experienced anything
this brutal before. Or breathed air so thick with biting ies.
But as we continued to head south on the highway to Marble
Bar—the hottest town in Australia—some low, broad hills start-
ed to rise from the horizon. We started to cross sandy creeks
and rivers, including the mighty Shaw, whose banks were gar-
nished with lush-looking coolabah trees, with their distinctive,
bright-white trunks.
As we continued down a dirt track into the hills, the burnt
plains gave way to grass-covered hummocks.
This grass is called spinifex, an amazing but
devilish creation. It grows as bushes up to one
meter in diameter, with round, ne blades that
taper into needle-sharp tips made almost of
pure silica. The tips will penetrate through just
about any piece of fabric . My supervisor
whipped out thick gaiters to protect his legs.
But he had failed to inform me of the hazard.
Without any gaiters, I was a walking porcu-
pine within minutes—my skin skewered with
multiple silica needle tips that broke o and
remained in my esh for months.
The land, ultimately, proved worth the dis-
comfort. Here I was walking over some of
Earth’s oldest, best-preserved rocks that con-
tain evidence of life from almost the very
beginnings of time on our planet. As I looked
at some wrinkly structures that lay above the
ripples of ancient sediment, I realized I was
looking at remnants of our great-, great-,
great-grandparents—the precursors to all complex life on Earth!
This area had changed much from when it was rst formed
3. 5 billion year s ag o. Back then it woul d have be en a black volc a-
nic land, with no color from vegetation. Over the hills I might have
glimpsed a green, iron-rich sea underneath an orange sky heavy
with carbon dioxide and devoid of oxygen. Nearby in the land-
scape I’d come across elds of hot springs, and here I’d start to see
some color. There would be stretches of white and yellow and red
around bubbling mud pools and splashing geysers, the colors of
sulfur, clay and iron. And in some pools and channels, perhaps
there would have been strands of beige, red and purple: colonies
of heat- and chemical-loving microbes. There might even have
been some green from very early photosynthesizing organisms.
If I were able to ride a time machine forward a billion years, I’d
see the Pilbara become buried under kilometers of volcanic lavas
and sediments; I’d see the landmass move
across the face of the globe and run into other
pieces of crust, the collisions forming moun-
tain belts. At about 2.5 billion years ago, I’d
see the oceans ll with life, the shallow coastal
areas occupied by huge reefs made of primi-
tive microbes called cyanobacteria that stack
in piles of mats called stromatolites. The sky
would turn blue as the photosynthesizing cya-
nobacteria sucked in carbon and pumped out
oxygen into the atmosphere. Almost another
two billion years later the world would turn
cold and become covered in a global ice
sheet, wiping out almost every living thing.
When it melted away, oxygen levels rose
again. Life really got going. Animals slowly
colonized the land, as did new types of plants.
The greening of our planet began in earnest,
and a wide variety of organisms appeared—
including, unfortunately for me, spinifex.
M. J .V. K .
CRADLE OF LIFE? Australia’s
Pilbara region, now dry, once
held hot springs and geysers.
August 2017, ScientificAmerican.com 35
pool chemistries, highly reactive interfaces, the ability
of pools to exchange compounds as geysers splash their
contents back and forth, and an interconnected, fluid-
filled, subterranean fracture network. When you do the
math, it looks as if a terrestrial geothermal field of 100
springs can generate a million or more new combina-
tions of conditions every year!
Each warm pond becomes an “innovation pool,” a
test bed in which adaptive combinations of molecules
rapidly emerge and find ways to grow and reproduce or
in which maladaptive combinations fall by the wayside,
unable to keep up. It is likely that immense numbers of
combinations might have been required to assemble
the first primitive version of life, in which case the pro-
cess would take hundreds of millions of years. But the
numbers of combinations in terrestrial geothermal
fields suggest that life could have originated and begun
to evolve in as little as 10 million years, with the first
stages beginning as soon as there was a stable crust
peppered with volcanic landmasses amid the oceans,
just more than four billion yearsago.
VENTING DISAGREEMENT
   that surface hot springs are the
most likely sites of life’s beginnings. The deep-sea vent
hypothesis is still alive and kicking. At

’s Jet Pro-
pulsion Laboratory, biochemist Mike Russell has devel-
oped Alvins original discovery of hydrothermal vents
into an alternative, elegant—but as yet unproven—
model. In his scheme, mineral membranes that form
minuscule pores within vent rocks initially separate al-
kaline water from more acidic ocean water. This pro-
duces a gradient of several pH units, similar to the dif-
ference between a solution of household ammonia and
a glass of orange juice. The gradient is a form of energy
that can be tapped; modern bacterial cells do exactly
this to generate the ATP they need. There is another
source of energy in the vents in the mixture of dis-
solved gases such as hydrogen and carbon dioxide.
Russell and his colleagues have proposed that when
carbon dioxide in ancient seawater mixed with hydro-
gen coming from the vents, the transfer of electrons
from hydrogen to carbon dioxide could synthesize
more complex organic compounds. In their view, the
mineral compartments resemble cells, and the energy
of pH gradients and hydrogen could ultimately evolve
into a primitive metabolism required by the earliest
forms oflife.
The hot spring field and deep-sea vent hypotheses
have some far-flung implications. Beyond guiding fur-
ther explorations of life’s beginnings on Earth, they
point to dierent ap proaches to search for life on oth-
er planets and their moons. If the deep-sea vent origins
theory is correct, the icy ocean worlds of Enceladus and
Europa may be good places to look. On the other hand,
if our model of fluctuating hot springs is right, then
these worlds are unlikely to hostlife.
What about Mars? Although there is good evidence
for shallow seas on Mars in the distant past, there are
few signs of a global ocean or of tectonic spreading
zones that create hydrothermal vents on Earth. If life
depended on vents to begin, it was unlikely to have be-
gun on the Red Planet. But if life on Earth originated in
terrestrial hot springs, it could have also begun on
Mars, which had the hot spring ingredients of wide-
spread volcanism and water. Indeed, in 2008 the Spir-
it rover discovered 3.65-billion-year-old hot spring de-
posits in the Columbia Hills on Mars, about the same
age as our Dresser hot springs, which did a great job of
preserving early evidence for life on Earth.
Both the deep-sea vent and the land-based hot spring
pools models have a long way to go before either can be
deemed correct. The origin of life is like a jigsaw puzzle
with many dierent pieces, and we do not know enough
yet to put each one in the proper position. At the Dress-
er Formation, for instance, we do not understand what
causes certain elements to become concentrated in dif-
ferent pools, how geothermal fields evolve over time, or
how their dierent chemistries interact to synthesize or
degrade organic molecules. We need to construct more
sophisticated experiments of prebiotic chemistry in a se-
ries of warm little pools, studying how complex organic
molecules form and how they interact and combine
when encapsulated within membranes.
Both on land and in the sea, chemical and physical
laws have provided a very useful frame around this par-
ticular puzzle, and the geologic and chemical discover-
ies described here fill in dierent areas. But before we
can see a clear picture of the origin of life, many more
pieces need to be put in place. What is exciting, however,
is that now we can see a path forward to thesolution.
MORE TO E XPLORE
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in Science, Vol. 28 3, pages 2 20–221; Janua ry 8, 1999.
The Onset a nd Early Evolutio n of Life. Michael J. Ru ssell and Allan J. H all in Geological Society
of America Memoirs, Vol. 198, pag es 1–32; 200 6.
Geologi cal Setting of E arth’s Oldest Fo ssils in the ca. 3. 5 Ga Dresser Fo rmation, Pilbar a
Craton, Wes tern Australia . Mar tin J. Van Kranen donk et al. in Precambrian Research, Vol. 167,
Nos. 1–2, page s 93–124; November 10 , 2008.
First Lif e: Discovering the C onnection s between Stars , Cells, and How Li fe Began. David
Deamer. Unive rsity of Cali fornia Press, 2 011.
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ters. Wriddhiman Ghosh et al . in Geomicrobiology Journal, Vol. 29, No. 10, p ages 879–88 5; 2012.
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April 3, 2 012.
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FROM OUR A RCHIV ES
Origin of Li fe on Earth. Alons o Ricardo and Jac k W. Szostak; Septem ber 2009.
scientificamerican.com/magazine/sa
... Vesicles on mica fuse to form extended bilayers and multilayers. "Lipid worlds" [113,114] could have formed in mica. ...
... On the other hand, there is also a school of thought in which membranes are the enclosed spaces where proto-life first evolved, e.g., [114]. ...
Article
Full-text available
Intracellular potassium concentrations, [K+], are high in all types of living cells, but the origins of this K+ are unknown. The simplest hypothesis is that life emerged in an environment that was high in K+. One such environment is the spaces between the sheets of the clay mineral mica. The best mica for life’s origins is the black mica, biotite, because it has a high content of Mg++ and because it has iron in various oxidation states. Life also has many of the characteristics of the environment between mica sheets, giving further support for the possibility that mica was the substrate on and within which life emerged. Here, a scenario for life’s origins is presented, in which the necessary processes and components for life arise in niches between mica sheets; vesicle membranes encapsulate these processes and components; the resulting vesicles fuse, forming protocells; and eventually, all of the necessary components and processes are encapsulated within individual cells, some of which survive to seed the early Earth with life. This paper presents three new foci for the hypothesis of life’s origins between mica sheets: (1) that potassium is essential for life’s origins on Earth; (2) that biotite mica has advantages over muscovite mica; and (3) that micaceous clay is a better environment than isolated mica for life’s origins.
... Vesicles on mica fuse to form extended bilayers and multilayers. "Lipid worlds" [113,114] could have formed in mica. ...
... On the other hand, there is also a school of thought in which membranes are the enclosed spaces where proto-life first evolved, e.g., [114]. ...
Preprint
Full-text available
Intracellular potassium concentrations, [K+], are high in all types of living cells, but the origins of this K+ are unknown. The simplest hypothesis is that life emerged in an environment that was high in K+. One such environment is the spaces between the sheets of the clay mineral, mica. The best mica for life’s origins is the black mica, biotite, because it has a high content of Mg++ and it has iron in various oxidation states. Life also has many of the characteristics of the environment between mica sheets, giving further support for the possibility that mica was the substrate on and within which life emerged.
... Although, from the photochemical dissipative structuring perspective presented here, an ocean surface origin of life would be favored over a hydrothermal vent scenario because of greater molecular stability and greater available surface area, our results may also be relevant to the hypothesis of an origin of life at the terrestrial hydrothermal fields associated with volcanic land masses exposed to solar UV-C light. In this case, wetting and drying cycles coupled to photochemical reactions [16,24] could have fomented polymer synthesis within vesicles [25,26]. ...
Article
Full-text available
Theories on life’s origin generally acknowledge the advantage of a semi-permeable vesicle (protocell) for enhancing the chemical reaction–diffusion processes involved in abiogenesis. However, more and more evidence indicates that the origin of life is concerned with the photo-chemical dissipative structuring of the fundamental molecules under soft UV-C light (245–275 nm). In this paper, we analyze the Mie UV scattering properties of such a vesicle created with long-chain fatty acids. We find that the vesicle could have provided early life with a shield from the faint but destructive hard UV-C ionizing light (180–210 nm) that probably bathed Earth’s surface from before the origin of life and at least until 1200 million years after, until the formation of a protective ozone layer as a result of the evolution of oxygenic photosynthesis.
... Although, from the photochemical dissipative structuring perspective presented here, an ocean surface origin of life would be favored over a hydrothermal vent scenario because of greater molecular stability and greater available surface area, our results may also be relevant to the hypothesis of an origin of life at the terrestrial hydrothermal fields associated with volcanic land masses exposed to solar UV-C light. In this case, wetting and drying cycles coupled to photochemical reactions [16,24] could have fomented polymer synthesis within vesicles [25,26]. ...
Preprint
Theories on life's origin generally acknowledge the advantage of a semi-permeable vesicle (protocell) for enhancing the chemical reaction-diffusion processes involved in abiogenesis. However, more and more evidence indicates that the origin of life concerned the photo-chemical dissipative structuring of the fundamental molecules under UV-C light. In this paper, we analyze the Mie UV scattering properties of such a vesicle made from long chain fatty acids. We find that the vesicle could have provided early life with a shield from the faint, but dangerous, hard UV-C ionizing light (180-210 nm) that probably bathed Earth's surface from before the origin of life and until perhaps 1,500 million years after, until the formation of a protective ozone layer as a result of the evolution of oxygenic photosynthesis.
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Within the first billion years of Earth's history, the planet transformed from a hot, barren, and inhospitable landscape to an environment conducive to the emergence and persistence of life. This chapter will review the state of knowledge concerning early Earth's (Hadean/Eoarchean) geochemical environment, including the origin and composition of the planet's moon, crust, oceans, atmosphere, and organic content. It will also discuss abiotic geochemical cycling of the CHONPS elements and how these species could have been converted to biologically relevant building blocks, polymers, and chemical networks. Proposed environments for abiogenesis events are also described and evaluated. An understanding of the geochemical processes under which life may have emerged can better inform our assessment of the habitability of other worlds, the potential complexity that abiotic chemistry can achieve (which has implications for putative biosignatures), and the possibility for biochemistries that are vastly different from those on Earth.
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The Kerguelen Islands, located in the southern part of the Indian Ocean, are very isolated geographically. The microbial diversity and communities present on the island, especially associated to geothermal springs, have never been analyzed with high-throughput sequencing methods. In this article, we performed the first metagenomics analysis of microorganisms present in Kerguelen hot springs. From four hot springs, we assembled metagenomes and recovered 42 metagenome-assembled genomes, mostly associated with new putative taxa based on phylogenomic analyses and overall genome relatedness indices. The 42 MAGs were studied in detail and showed putative affiliations to 13 new genomic species and 6 new genera of Bacteria or Archaea according to GTDB. Functional potential of MAGs suggests the presence of thermophiles and hyperthermophiles, as well as heterotrophs and primary producers possibly involved in the sulfur cycle, notably in the oxidation of sulfur compounds. This paper focused on only four of the dozens of hot springs in the Kerguelen Islands and should be considered as a preliminary study of the microorganisms inhabiting the hot springs of these isolated islands. These results show that more efforts should be made towards characterization of Kerguelen Islands ecosystems, as they represent a reservoir of unknown microbial lineages.
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This chapter addresses the products of liquid–liquid phase separation (LLPS) in research related to the origins of life (OoL). The products of LLPS are identified by several names, starting before the origin of the phrases, “liquid in liquid phase separation” and “membrane-less organelles.” Other names for these membrane-less organelles are MLOs, biomolecular concentrates, aqueous two-phase systems (ATPS), coacervates, and microdroplets. MLOs could form from an origin of life in the ocean or on land. MLOs provide compartmentalization, confinement, crowding, and stability for molecules. Protocells are more complex than simple MLOs but are based on LLPS. Protocells are defined, in this chapter, as being not at equilibrium, like living cells. Lipids are discussed, both as components of some MLOs and as molecules that can form vesicles, in alternate approaches to the OoL. RNA and DNA are biomolecules often used in research on MLOs at the OoL, as are amino acids, peptides, proteins, and intrinsically disordered proteins (IDPs). The inorganic cations of sodium and potassium are important considerations, given that K⁺ is present at high concentrations in all living cells, but Na⁺ is the dominant monovalent cation in seawater. Clays and wet-dry cycles are also potentially relevant for LLPS at the OoL.
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En este artículo, se explora la validación empírica del concepto bioenergético por medio de un ensayo aleatorio controlado sobre la caja orgónica. Para mejorar la validez del concepto, el autor basa el concepto de bioenergética en los principios físicos y en el metabolismo, combinados con los principios del Análisis Bioenergético. El ensayo apoya el concepto bioenergético demostrando que una estimulación «contextual” (en la caja orgónica) puede aumentar la cantidad de energía libre en el organismo humano, indicando su influencia en el sistema bioenergético humano. Estos estudios demuestran que el sistema bioenergético humano está sometido a la influencia del entorno. La teoría orgónica tiene debilidades formales y una estrategia científica correcta debe dar prioridad a examinar en primer lugar los dispositivos experimentales.
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Hydrothermal systems host microbial communities that include some of the most deeply branching members of the tree of life, and recent work has suggested that terrestrial hot springs may have provided ideal conditions for the origin of life. Hydrothermal microbial communities are a potential source for biosignatures, and the presence of terrestrial hot spring deposits in 3.48 Ga rocks as well as on the surface of Mars lends weight to a need to better understand the preservation of biosignatures in these systems. Although there are general patterns of elemental enrichment in hydrothermal water dependent on physical and geochemical conditions, the elemental composition of bulk hydrothermal microbial communities (here termed biocumulus, including cellular biomass and accumulated non-cellular material) is largely unexplored. However, recent work has suggested both bulk and spatial trace element enrichment as a potential biosignature in hot spring deposits. To elucidate the elemental composition of hot spring biocumulus samples and explore the sources of those elements, we analyzed a suite of 16 elements in hot spring water samples and corresponding biocumulus from 60 hot springs sinter samples, and rock samples from 8 hydrothermal areas across Yellowstone National Park. We combined these data with values reported in literature to assess the patterns of elemental uptake into biocumulus and retention in associated siliceous sinter. Hot spring biocumuli are of biological origin, but organic carbon comprises a minor percentage of the total mass of both thermophilic chemotrophic and phototrophic biocumulus. Instead, the majority of hot spring biocumulus is inorganic material-largely silica-and the distribution of major and trace elements mimics that of surrounding rock and soil rather than the hot spring fluids. Analyses indicate a systematic loss of biologically associated elements during diagenetic transformation of biocumulus to siliceous sinter, suggesting a potential for silica sinter to preserve a trace element biosignature.
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This article examines the role of theistic evolution in the work of three scholars: Christian theologian Keith Ward, rabbi and philosopher Jonathan Sacks, and Muslim physicist Nidhal Guessoum. Ward presents theistic evolution in a theological context, while Sacks and Guessoum present theistic evolution in broader contexts: Sacks as part of a reassessment of science and religion in western cultures, and Guessoum in arguing for a more sophisticated approach to science and religion within Islam. Their presentations of theistic evolution show the potential for theological and philosophical work concerning science and religion aimed at a popular audience which moves beyond the stubborn categories of conflict and independence or isolation.
The Onset and Early Evolution of Life
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Molecular and Cellular Fossils of a Mat-like Microbial Community in Geothermal Boratic Sinters
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Amide Bond Formation Driven by Wet-Dry Cycles: A Possible Path to Polypeptides on the Prebiotic Earth
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Ester-Mediated Amide Bond Formation Driven by Wet-Dry Cycles: A Possible Path to Polypeptides on the Prebiotic Earth. Jay G. Forsythe in Angewandte Chemie International Edition, Vol. 54, No. 34, pages 9871-9875; August 17, 2015.
Hydrothermal Conditions and the Origin of Cellular Life. David W. Deamer and Christos D
Hydrothermal Conditions and the Origin of Cellular Life. David W. Deamer and Christos D. Georgiou in Astrobiology, Vol. 15, No. 12, pages 1091-1095; December 2015.
A Field Trip to the Archaean in Search of Darwin's Warm Little Pond
A Field Trip to the Archaean in Search of Darwin's Warm Little Pond. Bruce Damer in Life, Vol. 6, No. 2, Article No. 21; June 2016.
Earliest Signs of Life on Land Preserved in ca. 3.5 Ga Hot Spring Deposits. Tara Djokic et al. in
Earliest Signs of Life on Land Preserved in ca. 3.5 Ga Hot Spring Deposits. Tara Djokic et al. in Nature Communications, Vol. 8, Article No. 15263; May 9, 2017.