Origin of Life by Thermodynamic Inversion: A Universal Process

The decisive step in the transformation of prebiotic microsystems into the simplest living units (probionts) consisted of the inversion of a thermodynamic trend toward greater entropy. Following this event, the contribution of free energy and information in the microsystem began to prevail over the contribution of entropy. The initial three-dimensional prebiotic microsystems composed mainly of hydrocarbons, lipids, and simple amino acids spontaneously self-assembled in hydrothermal media on the early Earth. The biological method of organization started at the inversion together with the nonspontaneous synthesis of more complex biomolecules under fluctuating nonequilibrium conditions. The accumulating information was concentrated in the core of a probiont. Circulation of bioinformation between the conserved (replicative) and active (functional) forms gave rise to the initial interaction between nucleic acids and protein catalysts. The inversion approach described here is universal and would occur on all planets occupying habitable zones around stars as long as they had liquid water, organic carbon compounds, and a source of free energy to drive chemical reactions toward increasingly complex polymers.