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And as the published report continued, “to the best of our knowledge … no model of a proliferating prebiotic system has yet been realized because different conditions are required for polymer generation and self-assembly.” “Proliferation requires spontaneous polymer production and self-assembly under the same conditions,” Matsuo said. “The hypothesis that prebiotic molecules were transformed into polymers that evolved into proliferating molecular assemblages and eventually a primitive cell was first proposed about 100 years ago,” the scientists wrote in their paper. Matsuo and Kurihara set out to answer the century-old question: how did the free-form chemicals of early Earth become life? Like many researchers, they initially thought it came down to the environment, such that the ingredients formed under high pressure and temperature, then cooled into more life-friendly conditions. Matsuo and Kensuke Kurihara, PhD, a researcher at Kyocera, report in Nature Communications on the development of their proliferating peptide-based droplets, in a paper titled, “ Proliferating coacervate droplets as the missing link between chemistry and biology in the origins of life,” in which they concluded, “This study may serve to explain the emergence of the first living organisms on primordial Earth.” It has been the missing link between chemistry and biology in the origin of life.” However, the origin of molecular assemblies that proliferate from small molecules has remained a mystery for about a hundred years since the advent of the chemical evolution scenario. “Since then, many studies have been conducted to verify the RNA world hypothesis-where only self-replicating genetic material existed prior to the evolution of DNA and proteins-experimentally. “Chemical evolution was first proposed in the 1920s as the idea that life first originated with the formation of macromolecules from simple small molecules, and those macromolecules formed molecular assemblies that could proliferate,” said first-author Muneyuki Matsuo, PhD, assistant professor of chemistry in the Graduate School of Integrated Sciences for Life at Hiroshima University.

The missing link that helps to explain the origins of life may not be an as-yet-undiscovered fossil, but rather, could be embodied in a tiny, self-replicating globule called a coacervate droplet, which researchers in Japan have developed to represent the evolution of chemistry into biology.