It’s among the most ancient of questions: What are the
origins of life on Earth?
A new experiment simulating conditions in deep space reveals
that the complex building blocks of life could have been created on icy
interplanetary dust and then carried to Earth, jump-starting life.
Chemists from the University of California, Berkeley, and
the University of Hawaii, Manoa, showed that conditions in space are capable of
creating complex dipeptides – linked pairs of amino acids – that are essential
building blocks shared by all living things. The discovery opens the door to
the possibility that these molecules were brought to Earth aboard a comet or
possibly meteorites, catalyzing the formation of proteins (polypeptides),
enzymes and even more complex molecules, such as sugars, that are necessary for
life.