Sprecher
Beschreibung
Sheref Mansy
In modern biology, many of the most ancient catalytic processes rely on metal coordination, particularly iron–sulfur clusters bound to short, metal-binding motifs within the active sites of enzymes. This suggests that metal–ligand chemistry played a key role prior to the emergence of enzymes. Here, I will highlight how environmental conditions can drive selection and organization in prebiotic systems. First, we find that that all major classes of biologically relevant iron–sulfur clusters can form spontaneously under prebiotically plausible aqueous conditions when simple peptides encounter iron and sulfide ions. The type of cluster formed is largely dictated by the ratio of iron and sulfide. We additionally demonstrate that ultraviolet (UV) radiation, a dominant surface energy source on the early Earth, plays a major role in the types of peptides that survive. This is because metal binding protects against photolysis. Together, these results suggest that physical and geochemical constraints alone can bias prebiotic chemistry toward metal-centered, proto-catalytic structures, providing a natural bridge between unregulated chemistry and the emergence of metabolism-like systems.