The protometabolic nature of prebiotic chemistry
Noemí Nogal, Marcos Sanz-Sánchez, Sonia Vela, Kepa Ruiz‐Mirazo, Andrés de la Escosura
Abstract
, systems that consume chemical or physical energy from their environment to maintain their internal organization in a dynamic steady state out of equilibrium). In the article we also pay attention to the implications of this view for the emergence of homochirality. The revealed connectivity between those prebiotic routes should constitute the basis for a robust research program towards the bottom-up implementation of protometabolic systems, taken as a central part of the origins-of-life problem. In addition, this approach should foster further exploration of control mechanisms to tame the combinatorial explosion that typically occurs in mixtures of various reactive precursors, thus regulating the functional integration of their respective chemistries into self-sustaining protocellular assemblies.