The prebiotic emergence of protocells is an important part of any origins of life scenario. Although fatty-acid-based vesicles are well studied, how they transitioned to phospholipid vesicles is uncertain. Herein, we show that cyclic-phospholipids formed from fatty acids and glycerol could have played a role by generating a heterogeneous library of vesicles with diverse morphologies and tolerance to a range of metal ions, temperature, and pH. The cyclic phosphate moiety facilitates the natural emergence of vesicles composed of diacyl-phospholipids to become part of the chemical evolutionary process. Competing emergent properties of the various systems (facilitated by additives) could have led to an early preference of the sn-1,2-acyl-substitution on the glycerol backbone coincidental with extant biology. Thus, cyclic-phospholipids could have played a significant role not only in early prebiotic protocellular chemistry but also in facilitating the chemical evolution of protocells from the structurally simple to the functionally more complex.
CITATION STYLE
Pulletikurti, S., Veena, K. S., Yadav, M., Deniz, A. A., & Krishnamurthy, R. (2024). Experimentally modeling the emergence of prebiotically plausible phospholipid vesicles. Chem, 10(6), 1839–1867. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.chempr.2024.02.007
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