Computational model of abiogenic amino acid condensation to obtain a polar amino acid profile.

Abstract

In accordance with the second law of thermodynamics, the Universe as a whole tends to higher entropy. However, the sequence of far-from-equilibrium events that led to the emergence of life on Earth could have imposed order and complexity during the course of chemical reactions in the so-called primordial soup of life. Hence, we may expect to find characteristic profiles or biases in the prebiotic product mixtures, as for instance among the first amino acids. Seeking to shed light on this hypothesis, we have designed a high performance computer program that simulates the spontaneous formation of the amino acid monomers in closed environments. The program was designed in reference to a prebiotic scenario proposed by Sydney W. Fox. The amino acid abundances and their polarities as the two principal biases were also taken into consideration. We regarded the computational model as exhaustive since 200,000 amino acid dimers were formed by simulation, subsequently expressed in a vector and compared with the corresponding amino acid dimers that were experimentally obtained by Fox. We found a very high similarity between the experimental results and our simulations.