Comets May Have Sparked Life on Earth
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 UC Berkeley, and the Univ. 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.
Read more: http://www.laboratoryequipment.com/news/2013/03/comets-may-have-sparked-life-earth
