Redox Diversity of Interstellar Compounds and Human Nutrients Reveals a Potentially Universal Chemical Constraint for Life

Comparative analysis of redox properties across three chemically distinct datasets—interstellar compounds, human nutritional molecules, and >40 million substances in the PubChem database—reveals a striking and highly non-random pattern.

Interstellar molecules and human nutrients exhibit nearly identical proportions of prooxidant, proreductant, and amphoteric species. In contrast, the PubChem chemical space is overwhelmingly dominated by amphoteric molecules (>90%), with minimal representation of redox-specialized structures.

These findings suggest that both prebiotic cosmic chemistry and biological evolution favor a balanced redox landscape rather than arbitrary chemical diversity. If the redox distribution observed in interstellar chemistry is universal, then any life that may exist elsewhere in the cosmos would likely share the same fundamental redox architecture as life on Earth.

This has implications for astrobiology, origin-of-life research, and the development of new biosignatures.

Astrobiology, Astrochemistry,