Role of Water for Life

Journal article, 2019

The behavior of benzoic acid in polyethylene inspired me to reflect on why water is a unique molecule that all living organisms depend upon. From properties of DNA in aqueous solution a seemingly counter-intuitive conjecture emerges: water is needed for the creation of certain dry low-dielectric nm-size environments where hydrogen bonding exerts strong recognition power. Such environments seem to be functionally crucial, and their interactions with other hydrophobic environments, or with hydrophobic agents that modulate the chemical potential of water, can cause structural transformations via ‘hydrophobic catalysis’. Possibly combined with an excluded volume osmosis effect (EVO), hydrophobic catalysis may have important biological roles, e.g., in genetic recombination. Hydrophobic agents are found to strongly accelerate spontaneous DNA strand exchange as well as certain other DNA rearrangement reactions. It is hypothesized that hydrophobic catalysis be involved in gene recognition and gene recombination mediated by bacterial RecA (one of the oldest proteins we know of) as well as in sexual recombination in higher organisms, by Rad51. Hydrophobically catalyzed unstacking fluctuations of DNA bases can favor elongated conformations, such as the recently proposed ΣΣ-DNA, with potential regulatory roles. That living cells can survive as dormant spores, with very low water content and in principle as such travel far in space is reflected upon: a random walk model with solar photon pressure as driving force indicates our life on earth could not have originated outside our galaxy but possibly from many solar systems within it — at some place, though, where there was plenty of liquid water.