R. Graham Cooks, the Henry B. Hass Distinguished Professor of Chemistry, and his postdoctoral researcher Lingqi Qiu have made a groundbreaking discovery. They have found experimental evidence that protein formation can occur in pure water droplets, and their findings have been published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
An important aspect of their discovery is that the natural “left-handed” structure of amino acids is maintained during this process, resulting in the formation of pure chiral peptides with the same “L” handedness. The researchers have identified oxazolidinone as a crucial intermediate in this reaction.
Furthermore, they have demonstrated that this dehydration reaction occurs not only in microscopic droplets but also on a larger scale, as shown in a lab experiment starting from the oxazolidinone intermediate. This larger-scale reaction is similar to the well-studied wet-dry cycles that are suggested to occur in hydrothermal pools and seashores, linking peptide formation in aerosols to prebiotic environments.
This study contributes to the growing body of evidence that the surface of water droplets is a highly active physical and chemical system, with high electric fields and extreme acidity driving the dehydration of amino acids to form peptides. Understanding the chemistry at water droplet interfaces provides new insights into the early stages of life’s chemical evolution.
The authors express their gratitude for valuable discussions with Purdue research associates Dylan T. Holden and Nicolás M. Morato.
2024-01-24 11:41:03
Source from phys.org