Abstract EANA2024-107

The research on chemical evolution towards the origins of life encounters a paradox when considering water: although water is the essential solvent for biochemistry, it hinders the synthesis of biopolymers such as RNA. Several approaches have been demonstrated to achieve biopolymerisation under special conditions, e.g. by removing water via evaporation or using other solvents, setting high temperatures, or adding special condensing agents. However, the plausibility of such approaches becomes an issue when a key principle of evolution is taken into account: evolutionary conservatism – the principle that evolution always builds on existing pathways. Applied to prebiotic chemical evolution, plausible abiotic polymerisation conditions should be in line with the known physicochemical conditions in living cells. This talk will demonstrate a synthesis approach that allows the spontaneous generation of large RNA strands with sequence complexity. The synthesis occurs entirely in water and will be demonstrated via fluorometry, capillary gel electrophoresis and nanopore sequencing. The key to this approach is to exploit non-classical properties of water, which arise when it becomes a nanofluid in the vicinity of suspended abiotic particles. Particle suspensions are ubiquitous in geology and represent nanogeochemical environments for vicinal and nanoscale interstitial water. These environments are analogous to nanoconfined water that exists within the crowded intracellular environment of living cells. Abiotic RNA synthesis in dense aqueous particle suspensions is therefore consistent with evolutionary conservatism and can be discussed as a plausible prebiotic solution to the water paradox.