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The chemical tree of the origins of life on Earth

Scientists from the Institute of Organic Chemistry of the Polish Academy of Sciences have developed an algorithm showing how a network of simple chemical reactions could have contributed to the emergence of life on Earth billions of years ago. Their discovery – “chemical tree of the origins of life” – have been recently published in the prestigious Science journal.

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It only takes a series of chemical reactions, under certain conditions, to generate life’s key building blocks from simple compounds, such as water, nitrogen, methane, ammonia, hydrogen cyanide and hydrogen sulfide. Building blocks are the basic molecules that make up proteins, nucleic acids, lipids – the most fundamental components of living matter.

Until now, scientists have only a fragmentary understanding which chemical compounds should be combined to create new ones that could give rise to life on Earth. They lacked also a coherent model that would show how the basic building blocks were produced.

Computing the origins of life

The team of Prof. Bartosz Grzybowski and Dr. Sara Szymkuć from the PAS Institute of Organic Chemistry,  has developed the Allchemy software. A smart computer algorithm allows you to simulate chemical reactions occurring under certain conditions, starting from the substrates specified by the user.

The team consisting of Agnieszka Wołos, Rafał Roszak and Anna Żądło-Dobrowolska using the Allchemy software, have systematized the knowledge of chemical reactions that could possibly take place on the prebiotic Earth and led to the formation of molecules important for life. Using the algorithm, they have found new paths for the synthesis of prebiotic compounds that the world of science was not aware of. Then the results of the selected simulations were confirmed experimentally.

This work is the first example of the application of artificial intelligence techniques to help systematize and broaden chemical knowledge, learning about hitherto unknown reactions or considered impossible to perform.

Read the full article "Synthetic connectivity, emergence, and self-regeneration in the network of prebiotic chemistry" in Science.