Our study, in collaboration with Durham and Oxford Earth Sciences departments, has been published in Nature Communications. Herein we demonstrate how, in early Earth conditions, layered double-hydroxides could have adsorbed amino acids, favouring the formation of peptidic bonds. We propose that successive wetting-drying cycles could have enabled the formation of peptidic chains having a length compatible to  that of simple functional proteins.

Erastova, V., Degiacomi, M.T., Fraser, D.G., Greenwell, H.C. (2017). Mineral surface control for origin of prebiotic peptides, Nature Communications.

All datasets related to this work are available here.