Amino acids as molecular linchpins in fundamental prebiotic processes

Amino acids are hypothesized to have been present on the early Earth via Urey-Miller type abiotic processes, in addition to being delivered via exogenous chondritic meteorites. Their potential coexistence in the primordial soup with RNA, amphiphiles and other co-solutes, highlights the importance of characterizing how they would have influenced various prebiotic processes. In previous studies, amino acids have been shown to interact with protocellular moieties and affect nucleotide oligomerization. Nonetheless, the outcome of such interactions on templated RNA replication, and on the physicochemical properties of single chain amphiphile-based protocells, is largely unknown. In this work, we characterize how amino acids affect RNA copying chemistry in their role as crucial prebiotic co-solutes. Additionally, we show how amino acids can promote self-assembly of fatty acid vesicles even under suboptimal pH conditions. Overall, our study shows that amino acids influence both information copying as well as compartmentalization, underscoring their importance in shaping the molecular pathways crucial to life’s origin. In all, this study highlights how interactions between early biomolecular systems would have affected their subsequent co-evolution, which eventually would have set the stage for the transition of chemistry to biology on the early Earth.