In search for the goldilocks zone in the chemical space for amino acid oligomerization that is relevant to the emergence of protein-based metabolism, we identified a significant gap in our understanding about how peptide bond is formed and hydrolyzed under ambient aqueous conditions. We identified a six-step mechanism that reproduces the experimentally known experimental barriers. By careful evaluation of a comprehensive set of levels of theory, modelling of solvation effect, and calculation of thermochemical parameters, we established a robust computational model to expand the bulk water focus to interfacial phenomena of atmospheric/hydrospheric and litospheric/hydrospheric boundaries. While we cannot travel back in time billions of years to witness the "birth" of the first macromolecule with pre-biotic relevance, we present the dataset and the corresponding publication in RSC Organic and Biomolecular Chemistry (July 26, 2023 issue) our attempt to establish an unbiased computational platform where we can evaluate experiments and generate experimentally testable ideas.

Web of Science record: https://www.webofscience.com/wos/woscc/full-record/WOS:000989927800001 Additional supplementary material is available at the RSC Org Biomol Chem website: https://www.rsc.org/suppdata/d3/ob/d3ob00410d/d3ob00410d1.pdf Funding information: We acknowledge the financial support from UBC Aspire Program (start-up funds) (AWD-019715 UBCOVPR 2021) for R.K.Sz. Computational modelling was enabled in part by support provided by the Advanced Research Computing at the University of British Columbia (arc.ubc.ca) and the Digital Research Alliance of Canada (alliancecan.ca).

{"references": ["Org. Biomol. Chem., 2023, 21, 5953-5963"]}