How did prebiotic polymers become informational foldamers?

TL;DR

This paper proposes a model where simple hydrophobic-polar polymers can spontaneously fold into structures that catalyze their own elongation, providing a plausible pathway for the origin of life’s molecular complexity.

Contribution

It introduces a lattice model predicting how primitive foldamer structures could have driven autocatalytic chain growth in early life.

Findings

Hydrophobic-polar sequences can form compact, catalytically active structures.

The system exhibits multiple stable states with different dominant polymers.

The mechanism is testable and relevant to origins of life studies.

Abstract

A mystery about the origins of life is which molecular structures $-$ and what spontaneous processes $-$ drove the autocatalytic transition from simple chemistry to biology? Using the HP lattice model of polymer sequence spaces leads to the prediction that random sequences of hydrophobic ($H$) and polar ($P$) monomers can collapse into relatively compact structures, exposing hydrophobic surfaces, acting as primitive versions of today's protein catalysts, elongating other such HP polymers, as ribosomes would now do. Such foldamer-catalysts form an autocatalytic set, growing short chains into longer chains that have particular sequences. The system has capacity for the multimodality: ability to settle at multiple distinct quasi-stable states characterized by different groups of dominating polymers. This is a testable mechanism that we believe is relevant to the early origins of life.