Project description

One unresolved question surrounding the origin of life is known as the prebiotic water paradox: how could simple prebiotic monomers overcome hydrolysis and undergo  condensation to form the first biopolymers in an aqueous environment? On early Earth, long-chain hydrocarbons of abiotic origin may have formed stable droplets.

We hypothesize that these droplets would have favored oligomer formation by concentrating  reactants at the oil–water interfaces, making them candidate environments for prebiotic oligomerization without wet–dry cycling. In these hydrophobic compartments, small molecules could concentrate at the interfaces where newly formed oligomers would be protected from hydrolysis. We investigate this hypothesis through Emulsion Polycondensation of α-hydroxy acids (αHAs), that share structural similarities with α-amino acids.