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patella.whack [soylentnews.org] writes:

Scince Daily reports [sciencedaily.com] that a new study [sciencedirect.com] [paywalled] shows that meteorite impacts on ancient oceans may have created nucleobases and amino acids. Researchers discovered this after conducting impact experiments simulating a meteorite hitting an ancient ocean.

With precise analysis of the products recovered after impacts, the team found the formation of nucleobases and amino acids from inorganic compounds. All the genetic information of modern life is stored in DNA as sequences of nucleobases. However, formation of nucleobases from inorganic compounds available on prebiotic Earth had been considered to be difficult.

In 2009, this team reported the formation of the simplest amino acid, glycine...This time, they replaced the carbon source with bicarbonate and conducted hypervelocity impact experiments...[and] found the formation of a far larger variety of life's building blocks, including two kinds of nucleobases and nine kinds of proteinogenic amino acids. The results suggest a new route for how genetic molecules may have first formed on Earth.

My knowledge of this area is very limited but I'm assuming by 'new route' that they are referring to the meteorite as vector, rather than the general formation of these building blocks via an impact from space. So the significance of these results is mainly experimental confirmation of the possibility?

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