Biology

Newly discovered chemical reactions could explain the origin of life

A new set of chemical reactions could help explain the origins of life on Earth
A new set of chemical reactions could help explain the origins of life on Earth

Exactly how non-living molecules sparked into life is one of the most puzzling mysteries of science. Now scientists at Scripps Research have discovered a new set of chemical reactions that can produce the building blocks of life out of materials thought to be common in the primordial soup of early Earth.

The first lifeforms are thought to have arisen on Earth billions of years ago, from a nutrient-rich mixture often called the primordial soup. Essentially, the molecules contained within began to react with each other, thanks to some added energy like lightning strikes or hydrothermal vents, until they formed basic organic compounds, then amino acids, which can then link up into peptides and proteins and, eventually, living cells.

That, of course, is a huge oversimplification, and the specific chemical reactions that took place during the process remain murky. Scientists have investigated by cooking up their own versions of the primordial soup, based on what was thought to have been plentiful at the time, and exposing it to different conditions to see what happens and how easily life’s precursors may arise.

For the new study, the Scripps scientists tinkered with their own primordial soup recipe, and discovered a new set of chemical reactions using relatively simple ingredients that were likely common on early Earth. All it takes is cyanide, ammonia, carbon dioxide and alpha-keto acids, and the team started seeing the soup producing amino acids.

Each of the four ingredients has its role to play. Alpha-keto acids are the precursors that living cells today use to make amino acids. The ammonia is a source of nitrogen, which the conversion process requires. The cyanide performs the conversion, and carbon dioxide speeds it all along.

“We were expecting it to be quite difficult to figure this out, and it turned out to be even simpler than we had imagined,” said Ramanarayanan Krishnamurthy, lead author of the study. “If you mix only the keto acid, cyanide and ammonia, it just sits there. As soon as you add carbon dioxide, even trace amounts, the reaction picks up speed.”

The team says this process is essentially how amino acids are formed in living cells, except that cyanide is a substitute for enzymes that wouldn’t yet have existed in the primordial soup. That simplicity and similarity to current biological processes suggests that this is a more likely source of early life than other hypotheses, which require more radically different chemistry.

Analysis of the chemical soup revealed that the process also produces orotate as a byproduct. Orotate is a precursor to nucleotides, which make up DNA and RNA, suggesting that a whole range of ingredients of life could have been produced this way.

“What we want to do next is continue probing what kind of chemistry can emerge from this mixture,” said Krishnamurthy. “Can amino acids start forming small proteins? Could one of those proteins come back and begin to act as an enzyme to make more of these amino acids?”

The research was published in the journal Nature Chemistry.

Source: Scripps Research Institute

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8 comments
WONKY KLERKY
Errrrrr,
Hasn't this been done before?
AND,
to the dim recollection of my worn brain-cell,
with soup ingredients ~ same as/above New Atlas piece?
FB36
IMHO, mind is brain machinery controlled/commanded by free will & life is cell/body machinery controlled/commanded by free will & there is absolutely nothing in science that can explain/create free will!
(That is why, for example, twins & even identical single cells have different "personality"!)
& so, humanity will never be able to create true AI nor true A-Life (nor will ever find alien life of ANY kind!)!
But keep trying by all means!
Expanded Viewpoint
Yes, it was way back in the late 1970s I think, that I had read something in a magazine, maybe Nature or Science News, that described some scientists taking gasses and compounds with some sea water, putting them into a piece of glassware, and then introducing some high voltage electricity. It didn't say how many Volts and Watts were involved, or for how long, but after the experiment ran for some length of time, the contents of the flask were analyzed, and Amino acids were found! So, the basic building blocks of organic life were created, in conditions that were a "best guess" of what was here when Earth was still fairly new. From what I have read, ALL living organisms on Earth have and use DNA.
noteugene
A chemical reaction can hardly be classified as "life". This entire article is a sham.
Mark R Windsor
Well said, FB36!
At some point science will need to accept miracles.
IMHO we will never be able to breath life into dead chemicals. I agree that you should keep trying because we will keep learning many interesting things.
No matter how clever the chemical reactions, to change them into something that has enough information built into their DNA to know how to reproduce itself, is a very big problem. Evolution can't start without reproduction.
kwalispecial
Re: Mark Windsor "At some point science will need to accept miracles." That's not what science does. It's fine to believe in miracles, but how many "miracles" have become explainable? Shooting stars used to be miracles, eclipses, lightning... And the inverse, curses: floods, illness, crop failures. Then scientists learned about the solar system, atmosphere, microbes, the way events in a far-away place can have an effect on our experiences through processes we can't (or couldn't previously) see.

If you believe in a god that created all things, then he created us and gave us the ability to figure things out. Our image of god may change, but it's not a threat to god to understand the world around us; it may just mean recognizing that god created the processes or chemical reactions that led to life, rather than that he plunked Adam down in the Garden of Eden.
djandersonny
I just jumped on board here, and it seems that essentially all of you accept the reality of biological evolution, though you may draw the starting line differently. That's all well and good. We really need to get into this on a deeper, more satisfying level, IMHO. Call it God's Will if you want. The Word made Flesh, if that works for you. This is Chemistry bleeding out of Cosmology bleeding out of Ultimate Reality bleeding out of Nothingness. That, Brothers & Sisters, is the nut! It seems to me that "The Universal Mind", "The God-Head", "The Undefinable Infinite", and the "Uncreated" of all this is the cosmic interplay of entropy and negentropy. The simultaneous running downhill of energy fueling the running uphill of complexity. This stuff all got started with the emergence of this dynamic embryonically from the Void. [This way I get to agree with all of you!]
Santos77
FB36: free will is a very interesting issue, an article/video came into my mind seen on bbc, some scientists say (a bit oversimplifying imho, not taking into consideration the currently unknown factors), that ultimately there is no free will. I do not agree with them, but interesting to hear what others think about a certainly interesting topic. You can find the video by googling "bbc the physics that suggests we have no free will"