OoL digest — February 7th edition

Astrobiology

Relevance of Earth-Bound Extremophiles in the Search for Extraterrestrial Life – Carré et al. – Astrobiology

Investigating the detectability of hydrocarbons in exoplanet atmospheres with JWST – Gasman et al. – preprint

Assessment of Ammonia as a Biosignature Gas in Exoplanet Atmospheres – Huang et al. – Astrobiology

Asteroids and life: How special is the solar system? – Martin et al. – preprint

Large planets may not form fractionally large moons – Nakajima et al. – Nature Communications

Deliquescence probability maps of Mars and key limiting factors using GCM model calculations – Pál et al. – Icarus

Permafrost Active Layer Microbes From Ny Ålesund, Svalbard (79°N) Show Autotrophic and Heterotrophic Metabolisms With Diverse Carbon-Degrading Enzymes – Sipes et al. – Frontiers in Microbiology

Preservation of Terrestrial Microorganisms and Organics Within Alteration Products of Chondritic Meteorites from the Nullarbor Plain, Australia – Tait et al. – Astrobiology

Biochemistry

Origin and Early Evolution of Photosynthesis: A Brief Historical Account – Cardona – preprint

Isotope effects at the origin of life: Fingerprints of the Strecker synthesis – Chimiak et al. – Geochimica et Cosmochimica Acta

Programmable Fusion and Differentiation of Synthetic Minimal Cells – Gaut et al. – ACS Synthetic Biology

Planetary Minerals Catalyze Conversion of a Polycyclic Aromatic Hydrocarbon to a Prebiotic Quinone: Implications for Origins of Life – Henao et al. – Astrobiology

Cyanide at the origin of metabolism – Islam – Nature Chemistry

Adventures on the routes of protein evolution — in memoriam Dan Salah Tawfik (1955 - 2021) – Jackson et al. – Journal of Molecular Biology

Visualization and identification of single meteoritic organic molecules by atomic force microscopy – Kaiser et al. – Meteoritics & Planetary Science

Phase separating RNA binding proteins form heterogeneous distributions of clusters in subsaturated solutions – Kar et al. – preprint

Rolling circle RNA synthesis catalysed by RNA – Kristoffersen et al. – eLife

Amino acid gas phase circular dichroism and implications for the origin of biomolecular asymmetry – Meinert et al. – Nature Communications

The limits of metabolic heredity in protocell – Palmeira et al. – preprint

Complex coacervation and compartmentalized conversion of prebiotically relevant metabolites – Smokers et al. – preprint

Free-Energy Transduction in Chemical Reaction Networks: from Enzymes to Metabolism – Wachtel et al. – preprint

Cyanide as a primordial reductant enables a protometabolic reductive glyoxylate pathway – Yadav et al. – Nature Chemistry

Biology

Deeply conserved synteny and the evolution of metazoan chromosomes – Simakov et al. – Science Advances

Planetary Science

Determination of the initial hydrogen isotopic composition of the solar system – Aléon et al. – Nature Astronomy

Impact and habitability scenarios for early Mars revisited based on a 4.45-Ga shocked zircon in regolith breccia – Cox et al. – Science Advances

Ultrahigh-Pressure Magnesium Hydrosilicates as Reservoirs of Water in Early Earth – Li et al. – Physical Review Letters

Hierarchical Bayesian Atmospheric Retrieval Modeling for Population Studies of Exoplanet Atmospheres: A Case Study on the Habitable Zone – Lustig-Yaeger et al. – preprint

Continental Magmatism and Uplift as the Primary Driver for First-Order Oceanic 87Sr/86Sr Variability with Implications for Global Climate and Atmospheric Oxygenation – Paulsen et al. – GSA Today

Strong evidence for a weakly oxygenated ocean–atmosphere system during the Proterozoic – Wang et al. – PNAS

The temporal distribution of Earth’s supermountains and their potential link to the rise of atmospheric oxygen and biological evolution – Zhu et al. – Earth and Planetary Science Letters