Evaluating the Plausibility of Prebiotic Multistage Syntheses

摘要

Of the various scenarios that have been invoked for studying the origin of life, the "RNA first" model continues to be one of the most favored. This is not due to the nature of the chemistry that would have been involved-which unquestionably presents many challenges-but to the great explanatory power the hypothesis provides for understanding how Darwinian evolution might have begun. The apparent difficulty in developing a convincing model of prebiotic RNA synthesis has therefore been frustrating and has led to an increasing interest in alternative models for the origin of life, such as various versions of "metabolism first" theories. Somewhere between the formation of mixtures of organic molecules-as exemplified by the complexity found in carbonaceous meteorites such as Murchison (Schmitt-Kopplin, 2010)-and the synthesis of the first RNA molecules, a number of critical obstacles must have been overcome.