ABSTRACT Research on the chemical evolution, booming during the 50ies and 60ies of this century seemed to have stagnated after that successful initial period. The reasons for this stagnation can be seen once in a too optimistic view that the principles of the synthesis of biologically relevant molecules from basic inorganic chemicals under primitive earth conditions is understood, brushing aside all critical comments and questions about the probability of the conditions needed for the hypothetical ”prebiotic” reactions. On the other hand, for those aware of these problems, further progress seemed to get stuck due to the lack of new reaction mechanisms which possibly could help to overcome some of these unsolved questions. In the research on chemical evolution of peptides, a recently discovered reaction, the “salt-induced peptide formation”, seems to have opened promising new aspects of how these compounds, essential for the evolution of life, could have been created under the conditions of our planet several billion years ago. In the presence of only simplest inorganic substances -water, sodium chloride and copper ions- amino acids can react to form peptides, and the results obtained so far are not only very promising towards the general applicability of this reaction to most types of amino acids, but reveal also some properties of the reaction which give it high credits for its relevance as one of the basic origins for peptides on the primitive earth: selectivity for α-amino acids, specific sequence preferences and conservation of optical purity over longer reaction times. The data available so far can be seen only as a starting point for a wide field of possible new research work on chemical evolution of peptides, and hence well stimulate a new approach on a broader basis to search ways how inorganic substances could have been involved in evolution to a larger extent than assumed so far.
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