Most of us think of hydrogen peroxide as a sterilizing agent, normally found in disinfectants and mouthwash. It’s not the first thing that comes to mind when discussing biology.
Yet, in a new paper published in the journal Astrobiology, Rowena Ball from the Australian National University and John Brindley from the University of Leeds in the U.K. suggest that this highly energetic and reactive compound may have played a critical role in the origin of life. Their “Hydrogen Peroxide (HP) Crucible Hypothesis” lays out the multiple ways the compound may have figured in the evolution of the first cell.
Hydrogen peroxide (H2O2) has two hydrogen and two oxygen atoms bound together. With twice the amount of oxygen as a molecule of water, it would have been a great source of chemical energy, and could have facilitated the prebiological
evolution toward the RNA world—the stage in the development of life on Earth that many scientists believe to have existed before DNA and proteins appeared. (It also would have reacted with a lot of other compounds, however, that don’t promote the evolutionary path toward RNA.)