Water: The Origin of Life from Water to the Molecules of Life

By Joseph C. Collins

How was it possible for the simple molecules which arrived on the early earth to be transformed into the extremely complex forms which compose living cells? If we are to believe the Second Law of Thermodynamics and the Laws of Probability, spontaneous assembly would seem to have been absolutely impossible!” Based on that Second Law, systems move spontaneously from order toward disorder – not the other way around. However, the process did not occur in air - most likely, it occurred in saline water, an environment which we now know has such intrinsic properties of quantized order that it not only reverses the direction of spontaneity, but provides the quantized entanglement properties which permits it to direct the formation of spatial structures and integrate their functions. Powered by energy from the sun and the quantized properties of surface water, molecules appear to have been directed into spatial forms, which fit so well within the environment, that they could assemble spontaneously and function harmoniously to yield the living cell.

The purpose of the book is to present an accurate graphic description of how the Quantized Hydration properties of surface water might well have brought forth the major classes of natural molecules and how it regulated their motions and interactions in such coordinated manner that they could assemble spontaneously to form living cells. Illustrations within the book should give even those with limited experience in chemistry an accurate view of the spatial structures of biomolecules and the incredible way water coordinates their formation and interaction

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: Jun 15, 2013
• ISBN: 9781626759459

Book preview

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I am indebted to the late Professors William S. Johnson and Carl Djerassi, who encouraged me to pursue Chemistry as a Career and to my Wife Betty, who put up with Molecular Models all over the house.

Thanks are due to Dr. Linus Pauling who reviewed my first book, The Matrix of Life, published in 1991: You are on the right track, but your ideas are too simple - also to Dr. Michael New, a Lead Scientist in the Planetary Science Division of NASA, for reviewing the present book before publication: Your concepts of Transient Linear Hydration and Quantized Hydration Patterning are valuable contributions to understanding the unique role of water in the origin of life research.

The Author

Dr. Collins received his degrees in Chemistry from Wayne University and the University of Wisconsin. After employment at General Motors Research, E I. Dupont and Sterling Drug, he accepted an appointment as Associate Professor at Illinois Wesleyan University. In 1967, he returned to Sterling Drug to direct Medicinal Chemistry and Developmental Research at Sterling Winthrop Research Institute until he retired in 1987 to devote full time to his driving interest in the role of water in the living cell.

He has a number of publications and patents to his credit and has had a synthetic organic reagent for selectively converting primary alcohols to aldehydes, The Collins Reagent, named after him. However, the study of natural molecular shape and surface hydration has been a major interest for many years. In this small book, he provides a pictorial view of how the properties of Transient Linear Hydration and Quantized Hydration Patterning may have directed the evolution of molecules to those which could assemble spontaneously and produce the phenomenon we know as life.

Basic concepts presented in this article were introduced in "The Matrix of Life"published in 1991, ISBN 0-9629719-0-1, Library of Congress Catalog Card number 91-90379 and Water: The Vital Force of Life published in 2000, ISBN 0-9629719-2-8, Library of Congress Catalog Card Number 00-90325.

Illustrations were developed on Apple®, Macintosh® and Dell® computers using Adobe® Illustrator®. Data for structural analyses and drawings was obtained from the published literature. Custom model-building was performed primarily with Framework® Molecular Model Parts (Prentice Hall, Englewood Cliffs, NJ 07632).

ISBN: 9781626759459

CONTENTS

Prolog/Introduction/Background

Chapter 1 – Water

Chapter 2 – A Story of Biomolecular Evolution

Chapter 3 –Protein Assembly

Chapter 4 –Receptor Site Hydration and Function

References

INTRODUCTION

How was it possible for the molecular debris which landed on the early earth to assemble spontaneously and produce living breathing creatures like you and me? Certainly, the Hand of God or The Force must have reached down from above or up from below to form and assemble the parts. Or, was it the Rules of Energy and Time which were handed down?

We all know that objects don’t assemble themselves – they require a plan and the skill to put them together. If we are to believe the Second Law of Thermodynamics, all systems in equilibrium must move spontaneously from order toward disorder – not the other way around. Certainly, molecular evolution does not appear to have obeyed the Second Law – life not only appears to have developed spontaneously but continues to function and reproduce spontaneously. Truly, life is a miracle which will never be fully understood, and yet, the past fifty years have brought us closer to an understanding of how it functions and how it might have all begun.

First of all, if we are searching for life, we must look for water ¹ – not pure water, not even saline water – but water which is a molecular mess. Can you imagine what it would be like if all plant and animal life on earth were ground into its atomic parts and poured into the sea? Unless cellular systems arrived on earth in prewrapped packages, that is what it would have been like. The question is: How did that toxic soup move into what we see today? Indeed, it is hard to conceive of an answer, and yet, there are clues as to how it may have happened.

The first clue came back in 1944 when one of the fathers of Quantum Mechanics, Erwin Schrodinger, concluded in his little book, What is life?, that it is water which reverses the direction of spontaneity.² Processes which occur in water move from randomness toward order – not as they do in air. In water, there must have been (and still must be) some sort of order to direct the conversion of early molecules into spatial forms which could function harmoniously together to bring forth Life. The question to be addressed: What is the Fundamental Nature of Hydration Order within the Living Cell?

The conventional view is that water is simply a solvent with little uniqueness other than it expands on freezing. What we fail to realize is that it has the unique property of being able to dissolve salts and charged molecules. For example, common table salt (sodium chloride) is so soluble in water that you might expect it to be soluble in other solvents as well. Well, it is not!! Water dissolves charged particles and accepts about 90% of their charge.³ Water is the only liquid which can do that!! Furthermore, it has been known for years that it is this same property which permits water molecules to form hydrogen bonds between each other and with oxygen and nitrogen atoms on surfaces.⁴

However, water molecules have too much energy to remain in ordered forms - they continually move away from ordering surfaces back into the bulk liquid state to increase their freedom of motion (their Entropy). In 1970, Lumry and Rajender published a seminal 102-page treatise in which they revealed that, as water molecules leave the ordering surfaces of proteins to increase freedom, they absorb units of energy and move proteins toward greater order.⁵ This discovery was extremely important because it provided experimental evidence for Schrodinger’s observation that spontaneity is reversed in water. By spontaneously moving from a state of order (low entropy) on a protein surface to disorder (higher entropy) in bulk water, water drives the assembly of the protein toward order. By obeying the second law of thermodynamics, surface water drives molecular structures spontaneously in the opposite direction. As stated by the authors: the enthalpy-entropy compensation pattern appears to be a thermodynamic manifestation of (water’s) ‘structure making’ and ‘structure breaking’ which will require reexamination of a large body of molecular interpretations in water.

At the same time, it was discovered that water adjacent to surfaces of proteins, nucleic acids and carbohydrates displays the Nuclear Magnetic Resonance (NMR) doublet peaks of ice, rather than the singlet peaks of liquid water.⁶ This was a great surprise, but suggested that water must be assembling in some form of hydrogen-bonded order on surfaces of proteins to drive and direct their assembly.⁷

In spite of intensive efforts to develop Fixed Structure or Flickering Cluster models for surface water, they could not be validated experimentally.⁷ Since the surface water-structure problem resisted resolution, the concept that order in surface water drives protein assembly was essentially forgotten. For thirty years, the thesis has been that it is the minimization of bonding energy within proteins which provides for spontaneous assembly;⁸ water is assumed to be a random surface-bridging medium but not involved in providing order. In spite of the use of extremely complex programs and spectral properties to follow motions, the results have been less than satisfying and recent studies, once again, have suggested that it may be the structure making and breaking in surface water (as proposed by Lumry and Rajender) which moves proteins toward increased order.⁹

In fact, the past ten years have brought major changes in our understanding of the structuring properties of water. First: neutron bombardment of liquid water at Stanford University has provided evidence that the largest ordered unit at any instant is the Trimer with three water molecules hydrogen-bonded together.¹⁰ Classically, liquid water has been considered to be a rather continuous hydrogen-bonding network