How life's precursors formed is one of those areas of study where all sorts of interesting results pop-up. Here's a paper claiming that comet and other impacts may have contributed to the formation of polypeptides.
One of the most interesting aspects of this is found in the paper's abstract:
Not only are peptides the building blocks of life, but they also most likely played important roles as catalysts in the formation of biomolecules on the primitive Earth. Polypeptides are known to catalyze the oligomerization of nucleotides, which can lead to the development of genetic material
This may solve some aspects of the chicken and egg problem of proteins being used to regulate the genetics that code for those proteins. So which comes first? This indicates that the potential regulatory enzymes might pre-exist the RNA that they regulated. From that perspective RNA evolved to be regulated by proteins in their environment.
Comets smacking into the Earth likely helped in pre-life protein formation
One of the most interesting aspects of this is found in the paper's abstract:
Quote:
Not only are peptides the building blocks of life, but they also most likely played important roles as catalysts in the formation of biomolecules on the primitive Earth. Polypeptides are known to catalyze the oligomerization of nucleotides, which can lead to the development of genetic material
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