The Solar System is replete with various simple and complex organic mixtures which result from abiological synthesis in different environments (e.g., interplanetary dust particles, asteroid parent bodies, comets, the atmosphere of Titan, etc. It is widely thought that such compounds and syntheses may have been important for the origins of life on Earth or the possible origins of life on other solar system bodies. However, solar system abiological organic syntheses often produce extremely complex heterogeneous mixtures of organic compounds whose identity may be difficult to unravel using present analytical techniques. We present here workflows which combine high resolution mass spectrometry and computational techniques including structure enumeration and reaction network modeling to attempt to understand the nature of complex abiological organic materials. These methods may be useful not only for identifying specific compounds in such mixtures, but also for formulating laboratory origins of life models and experiments and for the identification of agnostic biosignatures during the next phase of Solar System exploration.

Exploring the complexity of prebiotic organic chemistry using combined computational and experimental approaches

ACS Spring Meeting 2021

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