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They find all the building blocks of life in meteorites from outer space

Where did the building blocks of life on Earth come from? New evidence exposes that the ingredients necessary to support life came from meteorites from outer space. The space rocks that fell to Earth in the last century contain the five bases that store information in DNA and RNA. These “nitrogenous bases” (adenine, guanine, cytosine, thymine, and uracil) combine with sugars and phosphates to form the genetic code for all life on Earth.

Everything points to meteorites

It is not yet known whether these basic ingredients for life first came from space or formed in a warm soup of terrestrial chemistry, but this discovery adds to evidence suggesting that the precursors of life originally came from space, say researchers. scientists from Hokkaido University (Japan) in a new paper published in the journal Nature Communications.

Researchers discovered these compounds needed to form DNA and RNA in three meteorites that fell to Earth in the years 1950, 1969, and 2000. The meteorites are: Murchison, Murray, and Tagish Lake.

  • The Murchison meteorite is a space rock that fell in Australia in 1969.
  • The Murray meteorite was found in Kentucky in 1950.
  • The Tagish Lake meteorite fell to Earth more recently, reaching British Columbia in 2000.

Searching for the nucleobases, a crucial ingredient for life

While previous studies have detected purines (which includes guanine and adenine) and uracil in meteorites (these chemicals are necessary, they are not enough to start life as it exists on Earth). DNA and RNA cannot form (and therefore life cannot develop) without the presence of the other type of nucleobase, which has a larger and more complex structure: pyrimidines. This category includes cytosine, uracil, and thymine. Until now, cytosine and thymine had not yet been found, and the rocks contained these ingredients at concentration levels of parts per billion.

That is equivalent to “the detection of all the primary DNA/RNA nucleobases in the same meteorite,” explains Yasuhiro Oba of Hokkaido University and leader of the work. It is a remarkable find.

“These compounds are present in concentrations similar to those predicted by experiments replicating conditions that existed before the formation of the solar system,” the researchers said.

 

An unexpected discovery?

No way. Finding cytosine and thymine in meteorites is not a surprise . Experiments modeling conditions in outer space suggest that both elements should form there. But the failure to stumble upon these crucial molecules in space rocks left the question of whether there was something we had missed about the nucleobases of life.

“This means that such nucleobases would have been provided to Earth before the onset of life and could have played a critical role in the emergence of gene function in the environment ,” the authors write.

We may soon have additional confirmation when scientists can examine samples taken from the main asteroids Ryugu and Bennu by spacecraft developed by the Japanese space agency JAXA and NASA, respectively. Japan’s Hayabusa2 mission returned samples from Ryugu to Earth in late 2020 and NASA’s OSIRIS-REx mission is expected to return in September 2023 with similar samples from asteroid Bennu.

 

Supporting the Panspermia Theory

So we’re all made of stardust, as Carl Sagan said, but perhaps more specifically, of stardust that traveled on an asteroid and crashed into Earth like a meteorite.

 

Referencia: Y. Oba et al. Identifying the wide diversity of extraterrestrial purine and pyrimidine nucleobases in carbonaceous meteorites. Nature Communications. April 26, 2022. doi: 10.1038/s41467-022-29612-x.

Bruce Damer and David Deamer. “The hot spring hypothesis for an origin of life.” Astrobiology. Vol. 20, April 2020, p.429. doi: 10.1089/ast.2019.2045.

T. Yamaguchi et al. Hayabusa2-Ryugu proximity operation planning and landing site selection. Acta Astronautica. Vol. 151, October 2018, p. 217. doi:10.1016/j.actaastro.2018.05.032.

D.S. Lauretta et al. OSIRIS-REx: Sample return from asteroid (101955) Bennu. Space Science Reviews. Vol. 212, October 2017, p. 925. doi:10.1007/s11214-017-0405-1.

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