This grant supports efforts by  Thomas Preston, a Professor of Chemistry and of Atmospheric & Ocean Sciences at McGill University, to study whether and how aerosol droplets accelerate chemical reactions important to the rise of life on early Earth. Professor Preston and colleagues plan to bring a new level of experimental control and chemical analysis to Origin-of-Life (OoL) droplet-chemistry studies by containing droplets in a ‘trap’ that allows individual droplets to be studied for long periods of time, and by applying two powerful spectroscopic techniques (Raman spectroscopy and mass spectrometry) to study in-droplet chemistry. In-droplet chemistry may have contributed to the rise of life on Earth by accelerating various chemical reactions. This ‘acceleration of chemistry’ is important to origins-of-life theories because as chemical reaction times increase, yields become vanishingly small, and thus not useful for understanding abiogenesis. It has been reported that confinement inside droplets can accelerate chemical reactions by a factor of up to one million, but well controlled experiments supporting such claims are rare and there is considerable uncertainty about the mechanisms responsible for any enhanced chemical reactivity. Preston and his team will use use two levitation techniques – one based on light (optical trap) and another based on an electric field (electrodynamic trap) – to study individual droplets for long periods of time (hours to days) and under  a variety of well controlled conditions, to shed light on whether and how droplet environments accelerate chemical reactivity. Factors to be controlled and studied include droplet size (and thus surface-to-volume ratio) and the impact on droplet chemistry of photoelectric and electrical field excitation. Studying droplets for relatively long periods of time will allow the team to deploy highly informative measurement techniques such as Raman spectroscopy (probes molecular bonding) and mass spectrometry (information on molecular species) and to do so in a time-resolved manner.  Two different areas of droplet chemistry will be investigated: hydrogen cyanide chemistry and phosphorylation reactions, each of which include reactions essential to origin of life studies, including amide bond formation, nucleoside formation, polysaccharide synthesis, and ion-phosphate attachment.