The start of the Abiogenesis: Preservation of homochirality in proteins as a necessary and sufficient condition for the establishment of the metabolism

TL;DR

This paper proposes that the spontaneous formation of homochirality in proteins was a crucial initial step that enabled the development of carbohydrate homochirality and metabolism during the origin of life, based on experimental and theoretical analysis.

Contribution

It introduces a model suggesting homochirality in proteins as a necessary condition for the emergence of metabolism in abiogenesis, supported by experimental results.

Findings

Homochirality in proteins can spontaneously form under prebiotic conditions.

Protein homochirality may have driven the establishment of carbohydrate homochirality.

Homochirality in proteins is proposed as a necessary condition for the origin of metabolism.

Abstract

Biosystems contain an almost infinite amount of vital important details, which together ensure their life. There are, however, some common structures and reactions in the systems: the homochirality of carbohydrates and proteins, the metabolism and the genetics. The Abiogenesis, or the origin of life, is probably not a result of a series of single events, but rather the result of a gradual process with increasing complexity of molecules and chemical reactions, and the prebiotic synthesis of molecules might not have left a trace of the establishment of structures and reactions at the beginning of the evolution. But alternatively, one might be able to determine some order in the formation of the chemical denominators in the Abiogenesis. Here we review experimental results and present a model of the start of the Abionenesis, where the spontaneous formation of homochirality in proteins is the precondition for the establishment of homochirality of carbohydrates and for the metabolism at the start of the Abiogenesis.