A fascinating study that tries to solve the most difficult problem in the origin of life: bootstrapping. Nobody has been able to explain how the multitude of co

A fascinating study that tries to solve the most difficult problem in the origin of life: bootstrapping. Nobody has been able to explain how the multitude of complex organic molecules needed to support life got there in the first place. It's a little like we're trying to reconstruct modern industrial civilization by assuming Dow Chemical exists whenever necessary. Dow and the entire chemical industry arose from a bootstrapping process in which simple feedstocks become ever more complex inputs to ever more specialized industries. The Industrial Revolution would have been impossible without it. This study looks at the ability of alpha-hydroxy acids to spontaneously assemble semi-permeable compartments ("microdroplets") that could have played an early role, concentrating reactive species and enabling reactions that couldn't take place otherwise. As such, they'd serve as a kind of scaffolding. Useful for a time, and then discarded with the appearance of better structures. Four out of 5 of these candidates (which are all hydroxy analogs of amino acids), are chiral. The rate of formation, permeability, and durability of the compartments formed might expected to depend on the enantiomeric purity of the starting hydroxy acids. Surprisingly, the study apparently says nothing about enantioenrichment of the alpha-hydroxy acids. Then again, the study only begins to scratch the surface of what this new chemical system might be capable of. AFAICT, this is a brand new, highly hackable chemical system with vast potential not just in the origin of life, but across chemistry and biology. So far, the study only demonstrates inclusion of dyes. The real test will be to get these things to facilitate reactions that would not occur in the surrounding medium.