来自日本东京理工学院地球生命科学研究所的H. James Cleaves及其研究团队证明了α-羟基酸，很可能是丰富的前生物单体，可以进行寡聚生成大量的、可能完整的序列库，并且这些库在相当长的一段时间内都是稳定存在的。这可以发生在各种反应条件下(温度、浓度、盐度和同系物存在)，与早期地球和其他太阳系的地球化学环境相适应。这些化合物所能实现的高序列异质性可能对支撑生命起源有重要作用。
图1：用于本研究的α-羟基酸以及典型的聚酯缩合反应
摘要：It is widely believed that the origin of life depended on environmentally driven complexification of abiotically produced organic compounds. Polymerization is one type of such complexification, and it may be important that many diverse polymer sequences be produced for the sake of selection. Not all compound classes are easily polymerized under the environmental conditions present on primitive planets, and it is possible that life’s origin was aided by other monomers besides those used in contemporary biochemistry. Here we show that alpha-hydroxy acids, which are plausibly abundant prebiotic monomers, can be oligomerized to generate vast, likely sequence-complete libraries, which are also stable for significant amounts of time. This occurs over a variety of reaction conditions (temperature, concentration, salinity, and presence of congeners) compatible with geochemical settings on the primitive Earth and other solar system environments. The high-sequence heterogeneity achievable with these compounds may be useful for scaffolding the origin of life.
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期刊介绍：Communications Chemistry (https://www.nature.com/commschem/) is an open access journal from Nature Research publishing high-quality research, reviews and commentary in all areas of the chemical sciences. Research papers published by the journal represent significant advances bringing new chemical insight to a specialized area of research.
