In the following review article by EON postdoctoral fellow Richard J. Gillams, and ELSI member Tony Z. Jia, the authors present various case studies from nanoscience and surface science. Each case study involves a templated self-assembled system induced by a mineral surface, one of the most common interfaces available in the cosmos, and also a likely very important participant in the initial development of early life on Earth. These self-assembling systems templated by mineral surfaces, which include nucleic acid secondary structures, peptide nanofibrils, and simple ordered organic monolayers, may also have been able to contribute to the emergence of functional, structural, and chemical diversity on an early Earth environment. Such self-assembling systems are also known to play a role in biomineralization processes, a mechanism by which organisms can produce minerals (such as teeth, bones, shells, etc.) for its own use.

We envision a model by which mineral surfaces on primitive Earth catalyzed the synthesis and/or adsorption of simple biomolecules (such as nucleotides), polymerization of monomers into polymers (such as peptides or nucleic acids), and eventual self-assembly (such as in peptide amyloid structures) of these molecules into supramolecular structures. these supramolecular self-assemblies could then have catalyzed the formation of new mineral surfaces, resulting in a circular autocatalytic cycle. It is very clear that the geology of our planet was affected directly by various non-living chemical processes while the Earth-life system was moving beyond primitive chemistries and into a living system early in its history, resulting in an interactive and symbiotic feedback loop in which geology and early pre-living systems were closely linked to one another even before life’s origin. We hope that through these various case studies of mineral-templated self-assemblies, researchers in the origins of life and astrobiology fields see the merit of incorporating ideas from the fields of nanoscience and surface science into their own research.

Paper title: Mineral Surface-Templated Self-Assembling Systems: Case Studies from Nanoscience and Surface Science towards Origins of Life Research
Authors: Richard J. Gillams and Tony Z. Jia
Journal: Life 2018, 8(2), 10; doi:10.3390/life8020010

Elizabeth Tasker, Joshua Tan, Kevin Heng, Stephen Kane, David Spiegel & the ELSI Origins Network Planetary Diversity Workshop

We have found many Earth-sized worlds but we have no way of determining if their surfaces are Earth-like. This makes it impossible to quantitatively compare habitability, and pretending we can risks damaging the field.

See more at: http://www.nature.com/articles/s41550-017-0042

Tidal deformation of icy satellites provides crucial information on their subsurface structures. In this study, we investigate the parameter dependence of the tidal displacement and potential Love numbers (i.e., h2 and k2, respectively) of Ganymede. Our results indicate that Love numbers for Ganymede models without a subsurface ocean are not necessarily smaller than those with a subsurface ocean. The phase lag, however, depends primarily on the presence/absence of a subsurface ocean. Thus, the determination of the phase lag would be of importance to infer whether Ganymede possesses a subsurface ocean or not based only on geodetic measurements. Our results also indicate that the major control on Love numbers is the thickness of the ice shell if Ganymede possesses a subsurface ocean. This result, however, does not necessarily indicate that measurement of either of h2 or k2 alone is sufficient to estimate the shell thickness; while a thin shell leads to large h2 and k2 independent of parameters, a thick shell does not necessarily lead to small h2 and k2. We found that, to reduce the uncertainty in the shell thickness, constraining k2 in addition to h2 is necessary, highlighting the importance of collaborative analyses of topography and gravity field data.

Paper title: Tidal deformation of Ganymede: Sensitivity of Love numbers on the interior structure
Authors: Shunichi Kamata, Jun Kimura, Koji Matsumoto, Francis Nimmo, Kiyoshi Kuramoto, and Noriyuki Namiki
Journal: Journal of Geophysical Research, doi:10.1002/2016JE005071, 2016.
Read the paper here

Virgo, N., Ikegami, T. and McGregor, S. (2016) Complex Autocatalysis in Simple Chemistries. Artificial Life 22(2), pp. 138-152. doi:10.1162/ARTL_a_00195

Read the paper here

We prompted the attendees to define what they thought the most pressing and interesting questions are for the field, and to come up with fresh and innovative ideas for making progress. As written elsewhere (at the ELSI blog pages) the meeting was a great success, and hot on its heels the attendees helped put together a unique and timely position paper summarizing both the outcomes of the workshop, describing components of an EON roadmap, and challenging the community to address a number of key issues.

Not only did the paper get written before the end of 2015, it was fast-tracked into press at the Astrobiology Journal?(with many thanks due to the journal’s Editor-in-Chief Sherry Cady) and published as a fully open-access document in the December 2015 issue.

The paper, “A Strategy for Origins of Life Research”, is freely available here. In the January 7th editon of Nature?there will also be a short Correspondence piece calling attention to this document and, we hope, bring broad attention to both origins of life science and EON’s goals.

Finally, the workshop effort created a number of ‘birds-eye’ views of the origins field. One of those was a concept map of the scientific approaches and categorizations in use, reproduced here. For the full details you can go to the paper itself.