DailyDirt: More Clues To The Origins Of Life On Earth
from the urls-we-dig-up dept
The beginnings of life on our planet aren't well known because we simply don't know the exact conditions that were present billions of years ago. However, experiments under lab conditions that try to simulate the early solar system could shed some light on how early life developed, and there are some researchers looking into prebiotic chemical reactions to see if we can narrow down the possibilities and rule out any pathways that are unlikely to have contributed to our present thriving ecosystem. These experiments could lead to a better understanding of what life is and how we might detect other kinds of life elsewhere in our solar system or galaxy.- Some chemists demonstrate that many important prebiotic molecules can be created with just hydrogen sulfide, hydrogen cyanide and ultraviolet light. This finding could help end the debate over whether early life began with cell membranes or RNA or DNA -- or create more questions as it looks like the precursors to RNA, lipids and amino acids could have all been made at the same time under similar conditions which might have been common in prebiotic earth. [url]
- Professor Jack Szostak talks about the origins of life on earth and how lab experiments could help us understand astrobiology. Szostak discusses how early life on our planet might have started with simpler biomolecules than we have today and became more complex with natural selection -- but there are still a lot of unanswered questions. [url]
- Meteorites bombarded by radiation could have seeded prebiotic molecules on planets throughout the universe. Zapping formamide under conditions thought to be similar to early solar systems resulted in organic molecules such as nucleobases, carboxylic acids, sugars, amino acids, and some precursors to RNA and DNA. [url]
Filed Under: astrobiology, biology, biomolecules, dna, jack szostak, life, meteorites, prebiotic molecules, rna, seti
