Chapter 10.4 - Clay Minerals and the Origin of Life

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Abstract

Bernal first suggested the role of clay minerals in the origin of life because of the ordered arrangement of the clay mineral particles, the large adsorption capacity, shielding against ultraviolet radiation, ability to concentrate organic chemicals and ability to serve as polymerization templates. Clay minerals were proposed as possible genetic material. This appealing hypothesis was not yet supported by experimental data. Many experiments were run to correlate biological one-handedness to clay mineral chemistry but convincing data were not obtained. However, clay minerals act as very efficient catalysts in the polymerization of amino acids and nucleotides, thus supporting the possible existence of an RNA world preceding a cellular world. RNA adsorbed to clay minerals can be encapsulated within vesicles. Once formed, such vesicles could grow by incorporating fatty acids and divide, thus mediating vesicle replication through cycles of growth and division. The data obtained so far suggest that clay minerals played an active role in the abiotic origin of life.

Introduction

It is difficult to define the word ‘life’. One generally considers as living an open chemical system able, a minima, to transfer its molecular information via self-reproduction and also able to evolve. The concept of evolution implies that the system normally transfers its information fairly faithfully but makes a few random errors, leading potentially to a higher efficiency and a better adaptation to environmental stresses. Schematically, the premises of primitive life can be compared to parts of chemical assemblages. By chance, some parts self-assembled to generate assemblages capable of bringing other parts together to form identical assemblages. Sometimes, a minor error in the building generated more efficient assemblages, which became the dominant species. By analogy with contemporary life, it is generally believed that the parts were made of organic matter, that is, carbon skeletons flanked by H, O, N and S atoms.
As parts of an open system, the constituents must have been able to diffuse at a reasonable rate. A solid-state life is generally discarded, the constituents being unable to migrate and to be easily exchanged. A gaseous phase would allow fast diffusion of the parts, but the limited inventory of stable volatile organic molecules would constitute a severe handicap. Ocean (liquid) water offered the best environment for the diffusion and exchange of organic molecules. However, the diffusion within the oceans must have somehow been limited to allow the self-organization of the first living assemblages. The key role of clay minerals in the origin of life was first suggested by Bernal (1949). The advantageous features of clays according to Bernal were (i) their ordered arrangement, (ii) their large adsorption capacity, (iii) their shielding against sunlight UV, (iv) their ability to concentrate organic chemicals and (v) their ability to serve as polymerization templates.
Clay minerals are formed by aqueous alteration of silicate minerals (see Chapter 3). As soon as liquid water became permanently present on the surface of the Earth, clay minerals accumulated and became dispersed in the water reservoir. Since the seminal hypothesis of Bernal, many prebiotic scenarios involving clays have been written and many prebiotic experiments have used clay minerals (Negron-Mendoza et al., 2010).

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Section snippets

Clay Minerals as a Possible Genetic Material

Scientists who had observed the crystallization of minerals initiated by the addition of seeds to a sursaturated solution were tempted to associate life with mineral crystals. Schneider (1977), for example, suggested that complex dislocation networks encountered in crystals can, in some cases, follow the criteria of living units and lead to a crystalline physiology. He also discussed the places of possible occurrence in nature of this kind of physiology, such as terrestrial and extraterrestrial

Clay Minerals and the Origin of Biological One-Handedness

Common clay minerals such as kaolinite and Mt had no intrinsic chirality associated with their crystal structures and, thus, were not expected to develop stereoselective interactions with chiral prebiotic molecules. Nevertheless, both clays were claimed to exhibit asymmetric effects by several authors. Degens et al. (1970) reported that kaolinite catalyzed the stereoselective polymerization of l-aspartic acid eight times faster than the corresponding d-enantiomer. These claims were repeated by

Clays as Prebiotic Catalysts

By analogy with contemporary living systems, it is often considered that primitive life emerged as a cellular species requiring boundary molecules able to isolate the system from the aqueous environment (membrane). Also needed would have been catalytic molecules to provide the basic chemical work of the cell (enzymes) and information-retaining molecules that allowed the storage and transfer of the information needed for replication (nucleic acids).
Formally, the synthesis of polymers of

Clay Minerals and the RNA World

There is a general consensus that RNA was the most important biopolymer in early life on earth (the RNA world) since even modern peptide bond formation (protein biosynthesis) in the ribosome was found to be catalyzed by RNA and not by protein enzymes (Ban et al., 2000). DNA is believed to have appeared after RNA and to have derived later from RNA for the following reasons:
  • i.
    The ribose structural unit present in RNA monomers was probably formed from formaldehyde or an oligomer of formaldehyde. The

Polypeptide Formation on Clay Minerals

Clay minerals can also be used to condense amino acids in water by chemical activation, temperature/moisture cycles or both. A model for the prebiotic formation of polypeptides is based on the contemporary biosynthesis of proteins, which proceeds via the chemically activated monomer aminoacyladenylate (Fig. 10.4.3).
The amino acylphosphate derivatives of 5′-AMP condensed to polypeptides on Mt (Paecht-Horowitz et al., 1970, Paecht-Horowitz and Eirich, 1988). The products were polypeptides as long

Clay Minerals and the Formation of Vesicles

Mt was shown to accelerate the spontaneous conversion of fatty acid micelles into vesicles. The group of Jack Szostak assumed that a layer of cations associated with or adjacent to the Mt surface attracts negatively charged micelles or free fatty acid molecules, thereby increasing their concentration locally and thus facilitating their aggregation into a bilayer membrane. Clay mineral particles often become encapsulated in these vesicles, thus providing a pathway for the prebiotic encapsulation

Conclusion

Since Bernal's suggestion that clay minerals could have participated in the processes leading to primordial life, the mineral surfaces were endowed with exceptional virtues such as the possibility to host a primitive mineral life or to the potential to have generated the biological one-handedness. So far, these exceptional virtues have not been legitimized by experimental data.
But clay minerals could have been excellent catalysts for the formation of biopolymers of the first life in aqueous

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