Scientists May Have Found the Chemical Compound That Started Life
ORIGINS OF LIFE
The origins of life on Earth remain a mystery. Many have theorized and hypothesized on the matter, but no ideas have been thoroughly proven; those early years of emerging life on Earth continue to puzzle even leading experts. But one new discovery, made by chemists at The Scripps Research Institute (TSRI), could help to answer some well-worn questions about how life began on planet Earth: namely, what was the chemical compound that started life?
Prior to this discovery, scientists have hypothesized that a chemical reaction, phosphorylation, could have been a crucial part of life’s emergence. This chemical would have allowed for the combining of three ingredients that are critical to early life forms — short nucleotide strands to store genetic information in, short amino acid chains to carry out the majority of cell work, and lipids to form cell wall structures.
But no compound capable of such a reaction to produce these three ingredients has been found until now. Scripps chemists found a compound, diamidophosphate (DAP), that answers previous questions and could have feasibly been present on Earth when life first originated. Read more...
No comments:
Post a Comment