A carbonate-rich lake solution to the phosphate problem of the origin of life

This is the authors' abstract. We don't add key points for this paper.

Significance Phosphate is crucial for the origin of life because it is ubiquitous in key biomolecules. A major issue is that prebiotic syntheses use concentrated phosphate to incorporate phosphate into biomolecules, whereas natural waters are generally phosphate-poor because phosphate reacts with calcium to form low-solubility apatite minerals. Here we show that carbonate-rich lakes can concentrate phosphate to >1 molal levels by locking up calcium in carbonate minerals, which prevents phosphate removal by apatite precipitation. Phosphate-rich lakes may have preferentially formed on the prebiotic Earth because of carbonic acid weathering under CO 2 -rich atmospheres and the absence of microbial phosphate consumption. This specifically points to an origin of life in carbonate-rich lakes, and so defines aqueous conditions that prebiotic chemists should consider.