Phosphorylation on the early earth

A Stark Contrast to Modern Earth: Phosphate Mineral Transformation and Nucleoside Phosphorylation in an Iron‐ and Cyanide‐Rich Early Earth Scenario

“…In addition to these processes, localized environments enriched in phosphate minerals could also be formed as secondary mineral from volcanic phosphate tephras, similar to what is seen on present‐day Earth, or by corrosion of meteoritic iron. Studies have shown that in the absence of Mg 2+ , vivianite is the most likely mineral precipitate from phosphate even when Fe 2+ is less abundant than Ca 2+ . Due to the affinity of iron upon cyanide, the significant occurrence of vivianite opens up an interesting scenario for the mobilization of phosphate in HCN‐rich prebiotic conditions …”

“…Studies have shown that in the absence of Mg 2+ ,v ivianite is the most likely mineral precipitate from phosphate even when Fe 2+ is less abundant than Ca 2+ . [19] Due to the affinity of iron upon cyanide,the significant occurrence of vivianite opens up an interesting scenario for the mobilization of phosphate in HCN-rich prebiotic conditions. [45] Expanding upon this,w et hermodynamically modeled mineral formation under aw ide range of pH and redox conditions.W et ook particular interest in the region of moderate reduction potential in the pH range of 2-10conditions currently thought to represent the predominant environmental conditions during the Hadean.…”

“…[12] Historically,t hese issues have been addressed through ureacatalyzed phosphorylation with soluble phosphate salts and minerals. [13][14][15] More recently,e xperimental studies have demonstrated that different pathways can be utilized to create organophosphate species under prebiotic conditions, [16][17][18][19][20][21] while eutectic and alternative low-water solvents have been shown to liberate phosphate from insoluble minerals. [8,22,23] While these results have gone al ong way to address the problem of prebiotic phosphorylation, major questions remain regarding whether or not these,o rs imilar, reactions would be compatible with the environments present on the prebiotic Earth.…”

Schreibersite: an effective catalyst in the formose reaction network

“…It is assumed that 95% of the Earth's stock of phosphorus was concentrated in the core of the Earth leaving the continental crust with about 650 ppm phosphorus [35]. An inventory of the possible phosphorus sources in the hadean eon is given in table 1 as posed by Hazen [36] and expanded by Pasek [37].…”

“…The low abundance of free phosphorus is accompanied with its generally low reactivity towards organic molecules in its most stable form, orthophosphate. It is still highly discussed by what chemical pathway phosphorus could have been incorporated into organic molecules [37,38]. Besides reactions in non-aqueous media such as formamide [39][40][41][42][43][44] and eutectic media [45] as well as by use of condensing agents (urea [46][47][48][49] and cyanamide [50][51][52]) or activated phosphates (pyro-, tri-, poly-, cyclic-or diamidophosphate) [16,27,[53][54][55], one scenario is based on the meteoritic material schreibersite (Fe,Ni,Cr) 3 P [56].…”