What is the most complex, non-organic, naturally occurring compound?

Question

I am looking at what it took to bridge nonliving compounds to living compounds.

Answer 1

Your question is almost philosophical, and is the subject of a large field of science called prebiotic chemistry, astrochemistry, etc. It is a part of a greater scientific endeavor concerned with the origin of life, and if you want to read more check out the beginning of http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Origin_of_life

The universe started out as nothing by hydrogen. Nuclear fusion in stars then resulted in the formation of heavier atoms, starting with helium. If you look at the types of molecules that are in outer space they are either long linear largely carbon chains with alternating single, double, and triple bonds, with formulas like C6H, etc. or di/triatomic molecules containing largely C, H, N, and O. Since the "concentration" of anything in space (even in nebulae, for example) is very very low, there isn't enough stuff around to result in very complicated reactions.

Once you start putting things together into objects: planets, moons, meteors, and even the outer "relatively" cooler parts of stars, you have sufficiently high concentrations of materials to start doing chemistry. The exact nature of that chemistry is an ongoing source of study and debate.

About 50 years ago Urey and Miller demonstrated that if you take conditions chosen to mimic what they thought resembled the early earth--a reducing environment containing largely methane, water, and ammonia--and spark it with electricity to mimic lightning, you get a huge number of organic-type molecules, such as sugars, bases, and amino acids. Even though ideas about what the environment of the early earth was like have changed since those initial experiments, people have demonstrated this is a fairly easy process. You can use heat instead of lightning, rocks and clays as catalysts, and you always get a large number of molecules that you find in life today. That's how the initial chemistry must have happened. And indeed, you find these types of molecules on comets, moons, and planets all the time.

So that leaves bigger questions: how did the molecules we're used to come about, and how did everything become chiral. There are probably hundreds of scientific papers a year published on this topic, at least. Nobody has a good answer for why a specific chirality was chosen (all L amino acids for examples). In addition, in the various mixes of sugars that you get by doing the Urey-Miller types of experiments, ribose and deoxyribose (the R and D in RNA and DNA) are very minor components, regardless of conditions. Therefore the fact that we ended up with RNA and DNA must mean there's a reason for it (chemists have made in the lab many other types of DNA-type molecules with very different sugars, backbones, and bases), although there are as many opinions on why as there are people doing the research.

Lastly, how any of that came to form life is yet a bigger mystery. It is known that there are self-replicating RNA molecules. Maybe the ribose sugars allowed just enough flexibility to allow for the DNA-like fold to transfer information while still being flexible enough to form the ribozymes that catalyze chemical transformations. Maybe it was the backbone that was critical. Maybe the bases. How RNA arose in the first place is not exactly known, how it then expanded to the DNA-RNA-protein dogma that forms of all of life as we know it is not known, and how self-replicating self-contained structures (cells) arose is also not exactly know. Realize that when I say "not exactly known," there are probably a thousand published scientific articles about each one of those topics, it's just that there is no one answer that everyone in the field agrees upon.

But the topic is very complicated. You can check out the wikipedia article above and the links within for some more detail. If you're interested in this topic realize you can easily pursue a degree in chemistry, biochemistry, biology, or materials science and go to graduate school to study this topic. NASA also has undergraduate research programs you can apply to, as do many government labs which do some of the work in this field. I can't give you an answer, nor can anyone else, but it's an awesome question. (Alternatively I can give you an answer, as can many other people, but it will just be an opinion: there is NO scientific concensus.)

Answer 2

it depends how you refine organic, but there are a lot of ezymes that have a metal centre. Blood is mostly an organic compound but has an iron metal in the centre of it. etc etc

Answer 3

natural acids along with their sources are 1-citric lemon 2-lactic curd 3-sulphuric car batteries 4-formic insect sting 5-oxalic tomato, cabbage 6-tartic tamarind , grapes 7-malic apple , tea 8-acitic vinegar THANK U.......

Answer 4

well that is a very subjective question, but most "complex" biological molecules are organic, such as DNA