Iron-sulfur world

Wachtershauser G (1992) Order out of Order Heritage of the Iron-sulfur World. In Tran Thanh Van J und K, Mounolou JC, Schneider J, Me Kay C (Eds.) Frontiers of Life. Editions Frontiers, Gif-sur-Y vette, pp 21-39 Wachtershauser G (1997) J Theor Biol 187 483 Wachtershauser G (2000) Science 289 1307 Weber AL (1981) J Mol Evol 17 103 Weber AL (1984) Origins of Life 15 17 Weber A (1998) Orig Life Evol Biosphere 28 259 Weiss A (1963) Angew Chem 75 113, Int Ed 2 134 Weiss A (1981) Angew Chem 93 843, Int Ed 20 850 Wieland T, Pfleiderer G (1957) Advances in Enzymology 19 235 Wills C, Bada J (2000) The Spark of Life. Perseus, Cambridge Mass. 

Independently, there was the discovery in 1979 of the richness of organic compounds in hydrothermal hot vents (see for example Holm et al., 1992, and Chapter 3). The idea was fully developed by Wachtershauser (1988) and Cairns-Smith et al. (1992), and (of course) became another world. Life then began with the reduction of CO2 and N2 coupled with the reducing power of pyrite formation - and so was born the iron-sulfur-world hypothesis. Thus, the work of Wachtershauser also represents a link between the field of surface catalysis and the field of hydrothermal vents. 

It is occasionally suggested that experiments within the iron-sulfur world theory demonstrate merely yet another source of organics for the prebiotic broth. This is a misconception. The new finding drives this point home. Pyruvate is too unstable to ever be considered... 

Figure 2.4 Reactions in the iron-sulfur world. The dotted arrow represents ligand feedback. For more details see Wachtershauser, 2000, from which this figure is taken (with some modifications) with kind permission of the author. For the precise meaning of the numbers in the figure, see the original paper.

Heinen, W. and Lauwers, A. M. (1997). The iron-sulfur world and the origins of life abiotic thiol synthesis from metallic iron, H2S and CO2 a comparison of the thiol generating FeS/HCl(H2S)/C02-system and its Fe /H2S/C02-counterpart. Proc. 

Groundworks for an evolutionary biochemistry the iron-sulfur world. Prog. Biophys. Mol. Biol, 58, 85-201. 

Prebiological energy conversion at the prenucleotide level was suggested to involve a thioester world (De Duve, 1987), an iron-sulfur world , in which pyrite (FeS2) is... 

It has been proposed by de Duve (see Further Reading) that primordial acetyl phosphate originates by reaction of acetyl-thioester with phosphate ions. According to the Iron-Sulfur World theory, phosphorylation energy may also result from a transfer of the redox energy of CO/H2S in the presence of amino acids (5), which received its first support by phosphate catalysis of peptide formation (16). Subsequently it was supported by the discovery of a formation of aminoacyl phosphate in reaction of phosphate with aminoacyl N-carboxyanhydride (21) ... 

Antibacterial Drugs, Design of Iron-Sulfur World Isoprenoids... 

Wachtershauser G (1992) Order out of Order Heritage of the Iron-sulfur World. In Tran Thanh Van J und K, Mounolou JC, Schneider J, Me Kay C (Eds.) Frontiers of Life. Editions Frontiers, Gif-sur-Yvette, pp 21-39 Wachtershauser G (1997) J Theor Biol 187 483... 

Wachtershauser, G. (1998). Origin of life in an iron-sulfur world. In The Molecular Origins of Life, ed. A.Brack. Cambridge, UK Cambridge University Press, pp. 206-18. 

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