Sonochemistry on primordial Earth - Its potential role in prebiotic molecular evolution

Sonochemical processes are known to occur in nature and have occurred ever since there was liquid water on Earth. We advance a hypothesis that complex carbonaceous compounds, the probable precursors of life, were produced from simple primordial molecules by sonochemical processes in breaking waves of primordial seas or oceans. Our calculations show that these processes were much more common on Earth than other pathways, suggested for the formation of prebiotic complex carbonaceous compounds. The high occurrence rate of sonochemical events in breaking sea waves and the qualitative difference between sonochemical processes and other shock phenomena might have enabled formation of a variety of complex carbonaceous compounds, including amino acids, nucleotides and nucleosides, the precursors of RNA or DNA. (c) 2006 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.