Skip to main page content
U.S. flag

An official website of the United States government

Dot gov

The .gov means it’s official.
Federal government websites often end in .gov or .mil. Before sharing sensitive information, make sure you’re on a federal government site.

Https

The site is secure.
The https:// ensures that you are connecting to the official website and that any information you provide is encrypted and transmitted securely.

Access keys NCBI Homepage MyNCBI Homepage Main Content Main Navigation
Comment
. 2017 Oct 24;114(43):11264-11265.
doi: 10.1073/pnas.1715433114. Epub 2017 Oct 13.

Darwin's prescient guess

Affiliations
Comment

Darwin's prescient guess

David Deamer. Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. .
No abstract available

PubMed Disclaimer

Conflict of interest statement

The author declares no conflict of interest.

Figures

Fig. 1.
Fig. 1.
Hydrothermal vents and WLP. There are two distinct types of hydrothermal vents. So-called “black smokers” (A) are acidic and driven by heat from underlying magma. Alkaline vents (B) are produced by a chemical reaction called serpentinization, when sea water reacts with certain minerals in olivine. Fresh-water hydrothermal fields (C) are generally acidic due to dissolved sulfur oxides and are analogous to the WLP analyzed by the Pearce et al. (1). Images courtesy of (A) Office of Ocean and Atmospheric Research/National Undersea Research Program/National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration; and (B) Wikipedia Commons/National Science Foundation (University of Washington/Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution).

Comment on

Similar articles

Cited by

References

    1. Pearce BKD, Pudritz RE, Semenov DA, Henning TK. Origin of the RNA world: The fate of nucleobases in warm little ponds. Proc Natl Acad Sci USA. 2017;114:11327–11332. - PMC - PubMed
    1. Djokic T, Van Kranendonk MJ, Campbell KA, Walter MR, Ward CR. Earliest signs of life on land preserved in ca. 3.5 Ga hot spring deposits. Nat Commun. 2017;8:15263. - PMC - PubMed
    1. Corliss JB, Baross JA, Hoffman SE. An hypothesis concerning the relationship between submarine hot springs and the origin of life on Earth. Oceanol Acta. 1981;4:59–69.
    1. Kelley DS, et al. A serpentinite-hosted ecosystem: the Lost City hydrothermal field. Science. 2005;307:1428–1434. - PubMed
    1. Russell MJ, Hall AJ. The emergence of life from iron monosulphide bubbles at a submarine hydrothermal redox and pH front. J Geol Soc London. 1997;154:377–402. - PubMed

MeSH terms

LinkOut - more resources