On the potential of silicon as a building block for life
Name
life-10-00084.pdf
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5.95 MB
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Adobe PDF
Checksum (MD5)
a4de8972db941e7bb3b1e3c25979119b
Author(s)
Petkowski, Janusz Jurand
Bains, William
Seager, Sara
Date Issued
June 10, 2020
Journal
Life
Publisher
Multidisciplinary Digital Publishing Institute
Citation
Petkowski, Janusz Jurand, William Bains, and Sara Seager. "On the potential of silicon as a building block for life." Life 10, 6 (June 2020): 84 ©2020 Author(s)
Version
Final published version
Abstract
Despite more than one hundred years of work on organosilicon chemistry, the basis for the plausibility of silicon-based life has never been systematically addressed nor objectively reviewed. We provide a comprehensive assessment of the possibility of silicon-based biochemistry, based on a review of what is known and what has been modeled, even including speculative work. We assess whether or not silicon chemistry meets the requirements for chemical diversity and reactivity as compared to carbon. To expand the possibility of plausible silicon biochemistry, we explore silicon’s chemical complexity in diverse solvents found in planetary environments, including water, cryosolvents, and sulfuric acid. In no environment is a life based primarily around silicon chemistry a plausible option. We find that in a water-rich environment silicon’s chemical capacity is highly limited due to ubiquitous silica formation; silicon can likely only be used as a rare and specialized heteroatom. Cryosolvents (e.g., liquid N2) provide extremely low solubility of all molecules, including organosilicons. Sulfuric acid, surprisingly, appears to be able to support a much larger diversity of organosilicon chemistry than water.
MIT Department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Earth, Atmospheric, and Planetary Sciences
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Physics
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics
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Creative Commons Attribution
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DOI of Published Version
https://doi.org/10.3390/life10060084
