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Life's Missing Links may have Brewed in Primordial Puddles
How did life get started on Earth? Some of the answer to this age-old question have come to light in research recently performed at Georgia Institute of Technology [gatech.edu].
The crucibles that bore out early building blocks of life may have been, in many cases, modest puddles.
Now, researchers working with that hypothesis have achieved a significant advancement toward understanding an evolutionary mystery -- how components of RNA and DNA formed from chemicals present on early Earth before life existed.
In surprisingly simple laboratory reactions in water, under everyday conditions, they have produced what could be good candidates for missing links on the pathway to the code of life.
And when those components joined up, the result even looked like RNA.
As the researchers' work progresses, it could reveal that much of the original chemistry that led to life arose not in fiery cataclysms and in scarce quantities, but abundantly and gradually on quiet, rain-swept dirt flats or lakeshore rocks lapped by waves.
In turn, their work could increase our understanding of the probability of life's existence elsewhere in the universe.
The research from the NSF/NASA Center for Chemical Evolution (CCE), headquartered at the Georgia Institute of Technology, is generously funded through a grant from the National Science Foundation and NASA. The recent results were published on April 25, 2016 in Nature Communications.
The researchers go on to list several nucleotides and similarly-structured molecules that could have readily formed in puddles on a prebiotic Earth.
The full Nature Communications journal article is available at: Spontaneous formation and base pairing of plausible prebiotic nucleotides in water [nature.com].
My chemistry studies were limited and are long-since behind me. How close ARE we to figuring out how life got started? Thinking ahead, if we could recreate these primordial circumstances and create life from inanimate molecules, what consequences do you foresee on science, society, and politics?
