lpetrich

According to this Astrobiology Magazine article, yes.

According to William Martin of Heinrich-Heine University in Duesseldorf, Germany, and Michael Russell of the Scottish Environmental Research Centre in Glasgow, hydrothermal vents represent a good possible site for the origin of life for a very interesting reason. Hydrothermal vents produce deposits of iron sulfide that have a honeycomb-like microstructure with "cells" having sizes of a few microns. And Martin and Russell suggest that these "cells" could have allowed the earliest life to have a cellular structure before those organisms worked out how to produce cell membranes.

The catalytic properties of the deposits' surface would have induced numerous chemical reactions in the flowing-by hydrothermal-vent fluids, some of which could well have led to the origin of life. A scenario first proposed by Gunter Wachtershauser some years back; he proposed that life originated from iron-sulfur chemistry on pyrite (iron sulfide) rocks.

But can this happen in the laboratory? George Cody and his colleagues at the Carnegie Institution of Washington succeeded in producing pyruvic acid, a common metabolic intermediate, with the help of iron sulfide, formic acid, and alkyl thiol that were heated and pressurized together.

This conclusion agrees with the results of some attempts to work backwards from present-day organisms. One enzyme important in biosynthesis, ferredoxin, has an iron-sulfur core -- and according to one reconstruction, its ancestral form had a negatively-charged tail, making it adapted to sticking to mineral surfaces with their positively-charged ions.

Also, this ancestral form was made out of relatively simple amino acids, those relatively easy to produce by prebiotic chemistry. By comparison, proteins associated with cell membranes tended to have more difficult-to-produce amino acids that would have been later acquisitions or inventions.

At least according to this paper:

Davis BK.
Molecular evolution before the origin of species.
Prog Biophys Mol Biol 2002 May-Jul;79(1-3):77-133
At this PubMed entry.

sakrilege

I was wondering if the first forms of this life would still exist but apparently not.

Godbert

That would have been extremely unlikely no matter what the initial scenario. It seems that the first forms of life who just had a small selective advantage over 'random' chemical reactions would have no chance competing with the life that evolved later would have been ''eaten'' by it very early in evolution.

Ipetrich: thanks for summing up that 57p. paper for us

sakrilege

I was thinking along the lines of blue green algae still being abundant. Plus if the life was contained in the rock structure I did imagine some protection.

I will be interested to know if the study of old iron sulfide deposits yields any clues.

Godbert

Green algae are on a way higher level, being eukaryots.
Surviving in the rock is a possibility but even then they would have changed a lot due to the changing environment (reducing to oxidizing, nowhere near primordial soup anymore, competing life outside the rock stealing the nutrients...) and not be very close to the first life form any more - although I admit living in a rock certainly puts some constraints on your evolutionary development.

sakrilege

Well, gee, high school biology (1970) as my only training shows doesn't it. I do keep forgetting that the environmental changes are critical.


Not everybody can stay with the pack.

Godbert

actually, thinking some more about it, the environment at deep sea hydrothermal vents might not be that far off what it used to be - except for the influence of new local life forms on nutrition/mineral supply. I just really don't have that knowledge. Seems I'll have to read those 57 pages after all - grrrrrrr

beausoleil

Blue-green algae (what sakrilege mentioned) are prokaryotes. Algae is something of a misnomer. We tend to call them cyanobacteria these days.

Hydrothermal vents have whole ecosystems of specialised life forms around them - I suspect they would out-compete any 'original' life as someone mentioned above.

sakrilege

I knew of the cyanobacteria terminology (which I almost used) but I didn't know that algae was misleading. I will have to file that away for future reference.

Godbert

I am humbled. My only excuse is the somewhat misleading nomenclature. But for me as a molecular biology student this certainly warrants a serious self-flagellation.

Still cyanobacteria are not that close to the first life form. Although, they are the ones who wiped out early life (or at least forced it (including themselves) to evolve quite a bit) by starting the free oxygen production.