Abstract Oligopeptides supposed to be essential to primitive living cells could not be obtained by a prebiotic organic chemistry working mainly at random. Selection pathways were required. Experimental evidence is given for selective condensation of amino-acids in water as well as for selective resistance to degradation. Polycationic polypeptides containing lysyl (or arginyl) and hydrophobic residues strongly accelerate the hydrolysis of oligoribonucleotides. A ionic complex is first formed and the polypeptides are particularly active when they adopt a stable conformation, β-sheet or α-helix, in the complex. Well-defined short peptides were synthesized in order to determine the critical chain-length required for chemical activity. In a contemporary cell, proteins represent about 40 % of the dry weight. They fulfil a structural role and they are particularly helpful as chemical catalysts (enzymes). They can be represented as long chains made of twenty different building blocks, the amino-acids NH2CHRCOOH, which differ by the side-chain R. Proteins are remarkable in the sense that they use amino-acids having only one carbon atom between the NH2 and COOH functions. The central carbon atom has always the same spatial asymmetry (chirality) and always bears a hydrogen atom. When the side-chain R is a hydrocarbon, it is branched. When R contains a chemical function, the side functions do not participate to the peptide bond construction. The protein chain results from the condensation of amino-acids, i.e. water molecules are removed between molecules in a medium which is mainly aqueous (the cell contains 75 % of water). The protein chains adopt rigid asymmetric conformations (α-helices, β-sheet structures) which are essential for the protein functions. Proteins, even the smallest ones, are too sophisticated entities to be considered as the products of an organic chemistry working at random, without any chemical selection. The chemist has therefore to understand, with simple models, how primitive proteins were selected and how they began to exhibit chemical activity.
Early peptidic enzymes
Advances in Space Research ; 9 , 6 ; 83-87
1989-01-01
5 pages
Article (Journal)
Electronic Resource
English
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