A mystery that has haunted us for 4,000 million years. How did life begin on our planet? Did the ingredients of life come through a comet? Did everything arise on Earth? A team of scientists from the MRC Laboratory for Molecular Biology in Cambridge (UK) offers an answer to this age-old enigma in the latest issue of the journal Nature Chemistry .
And the solution to this mystery is that all theories have their part of reason. According to chemists, the first meteorites that reached Earth would have brought the ingredients that later reacted with the nitrogen already present in the planet’s atmosphere ; this produced a large amount of hydrogen cyanide. By dissolving in water, they would have come into contact with hydrogen sulfide and be exposed to the sun’s ultraviolet light at the same time. All of this generated the “mixture of life” through which it made its way on our planet.
The experts describe how they were able to map reactions that produced tricarbon sugars, amino acids, ribonucleotides and glycerol , all of them essential materials for metabolism and for the creation of the building blocks of proteins and ribonucleic acid molecules and, of course, to facilitate the creation of lipids that are what make up cell membranes.
Thus, all the arguments currently defended by the scientific community would make sense at the same time and that only by using these three basic ingredients the mechanism that triggered life produced more than 50 nucleic acids , precursors of DNA and RNA molecules.
