A team of international scientists has made a surprising discovery: they have discovered a molecule essential for life at the heart of our galaxy.
The mysteries of molecular biology
The molecule in question is propylene oxide and has been located in the cold and outer zones of a cloud of gas and dust known as Sagittarius B2 , which is approximately three million more than the mass of the Sun and is very close to the center of the Milky Way. Like other chiral molecules, it can have two specular shapes, with different properties as if it were a pair of human hands.
Thus, they can be right-handed (left-handed) or left-handed (left-handed); This is what we call chirality. Without identical but not superimposable (they have, for example, the same boiling and melting points). And life on Earth is made up of groups of these types of molecules.
This discovery will help, therefore, to solve one of the great mysteries of molecular biology: how it happened that all living beings used molecules of a single variant and despised the other.
A chiral molecule had never been discovered in space. Up to now. “ This is the first molecule detected in interstellar space that has the property of chirality, so it is a pioneering leap in our understanding of how prebiotic molecules are made in the Universe and the effects they can have on the origins of life, “says Brett McGuire, a chemist at the National Radio Astronomy Observatory in Charlottesville (USA), to Science magazine.
The presence of propylene oxide in space, despite not being found in living organisms, is a sign of the existence of other chiral molecules: “Although the technique we use does not tell us about the abundance of each enantiomer, we hope that this work allows future observations that make us understand much more about chiral molecules, the origins of homochirality and life in general ”, clarifies Brandon Carroll, co-author of the work.
