New Insights on the Chemical Origin of Life: The Role of Aqueous Polymerization of N ‐carboxyanhydrides (NCA)
Résumé
Abstract At the origin, the emergence of proteins was based on crucial prebiotic stages in which simple amino acids‐based building blocks spontaneously evolved from the prebiotic soup into random proto‐polymers called protoproteins. Despite advances in modern peptide synthesis, these prebiotic chemical routes to protoproteins remain puzzling. We discuss in this perspective how polymer science and systems chemistry are reaching a point of convergence in which simple monomers called N ‐carboxyanhydrides would be able to form such protoproteins via the emergence of a protometabolic cycle involving aqueous polymerization and featuring macromolecular Darwinism behavior.