How did life get started by naturalistic means? Well scientists are getting closer to learning how it got started, or at leaning more steps of some ways it might have got started. (Though could be many naturalistic ways for life to get started, and as a result any individual specific way might not have been the precise way it got started the first time. Earth might not have even started on Earth, but instead might have come to Earth. I also might have got started in multiple places each at a different time and even by somewhat different methods.)
It looks like cyanide might have played a key role on how life got started. There is an article from July 28, 2022 about this located at https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2022/07/220728112005.htm and there is an article about from February 3, 2022 at https://www.sciencefocus.com/news/cyanide-may-have-played-a-key-role-in-the-origin-of-life-on-earth-and-could-help-us-find-et/ .
The article from February says in part the following.
'Though perhaps better known as the lethal substance taken in pill
form by captured spies in cheesy thriller movies, cyanide may have
helped life to evolve on Earth.
... The team have shown that the
chemical compound, which contains a carbon atom bonded to a nitrogen
atom, could have enabled some of the first metabolic reactions on Earth
that created carbon-based compounds from carbon dioxide. Metabolic
reactions are reactions that create energy out of food and are essential
for sustaining life.
... As they already knew that cyanide was present in the atmosphere back
then, they mapped out a set of reactions that could potentially use
cyanide to produce more complex organic molecules from carbon dioxide
and then tested them in the lab.
“It was scary how simple it was,”
said Krishnamurthy. “We really didn’t have to do anything special, we
mixed together these molecules, waited and the reaction happened
spontaneously.”
The article from July says in part the following.
' "We've come up with a new paradigm to explain this shift from prebiotic
to biotic chemistry," says Ramanarayanan Krishnamurthy, PhD, an
associate professor of chemistry at Scripps Research, and lead author of
the new paper, published July 28, 2022 in the journal Nature Chemistry. "We think the kind of reactions we've described are probably what could have happened on early earth."
... After their success using cyanide to drive other chemical reactions,
Krishnamurthy and his colleagues suspected that cyanide, even without
enzymes, might also help turn α-keto acids into amino acids. Because
they knew nitrogen would be required in some form, they added ammonia --
a form of nitrogen that would have been present on the early earth.
Then, through trial and error, they discovered a third key ingredient:
carbon dioxide. With this mixture, they quickly started seeing amino
acids form.
.. Because the new reaction is relatively similar to what occurs today
inside cells -- except for being driven by cyanide instead of a protein
-- it seems more likely to be the source of early life, rather than
drastically different reactions, the researchers say. The research also
helps bring together two sides of a long-standing debate about the
importance of carbon dioxide to early life, concluding that carbon
dioxide was key, but only in combination with other molecules.
In the process of studying their chemical soup, Krishnamurthy's group
discovered that a byproduct of the same reaction is orotate, a
precursor to nucleotides that make up DNA and RNA. This suggests that
the same primordial soup, under the right conditions, could have given
rise to a large number of the molecules that are required for the key
elements of life.'
There is also an article from July 29, 2022 located at https://interestingengineering.com/science/discovery-may-explain-origin-life . It says that the experiment "... provides the simplest hypothesis yet for the chemical reactions that sparked life on Earth." That article in part says the following.
"The new discovery brings us a step closer to understanding how life
flourished in the ancient past. It adds a new, strong hypothesis for the
origin of life on Earth, detailing the materials and reactions that may
have taken place long ago.
... Now, the Scripps scientists developed their own version of the
primordial soup based on materials that were thought to be abundant in
the early stages of life on Earth. They discovered a new set of chemical
reactions using relatively simple ingredients that could have led to
the first life on Earth.
... Alpha-keto acids are used by living cells today to make amino acids.
Ammonia provides nitrogen, which is required for the conversion process.
The cyanide enables the conversion, while the carbon dioxide speeds up
the whole process.
... The scientists believe that, as their process is simpler than other
hypotheses, it is more likely to have occurred during the earliest
stages of life formation on our planet."
