Intrinsic disorder, extraterrestrial peptides, and prebiotic life on the earth

Abstract

The discovery of mechanisms for the synthesis of homo-polymeric oligopeptides, such as polyglycine under conditions relevant to the astrophysical environment as well as in scenarios resembling primordial conditions that prevailed soon after Earth was formed, raises hopes in the search of extraterrestrial life. It also raises the possibility of extraterrestrial contribution to origin of life on Earth in the form of simple polypeptides. Bioinformatics analyses strongly predict such homo-polymeric peptides to be intrinsically disordered underscoring the potential involvement of IDPs in the origin of life which, even in its simplest form, could emerge spontaneously by autocatalysis of the primordial IDPs in self-organizing systems that evolved over time following natural selection.

Communicated by Ramaswamy H. Sarma.

Keywords:

• Extraterrestrial life
• prebiotic evolution
• intrinsically disordered proteins
• polyglycine
• aminoketene condensation

Acknowledgements

We are thankful to three anonymous reviewers for their constructive criticism.

Disclosure statement

The authors declare no conflict of interest. The funders had no role in the design of the study; in the collection, analyses, or interpretation of data; in the writing of the manuscript, or in the decision to publish the results.