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Amino Acids Created in Deep-Space-Like Environment
klevin writes "NASA scientists today announced the creation of amino acids, critical for life, in an environment that mimics deep space. The above link is the press release, with additional details here."
does his mean my chances for finding an alien hotty, ala kirk, have just gone way up?
Isn't this similar to what Stanley Miller and Harold Urey found in the 1960's with their spark-chamber experiment? While this seems to be stellar in nature, how much different is UV photolysis from electrical discharge as far as chemical reactions go?
This is mildly cool, but honestly it's done all the time by companies like TwinLab who sell them to body builders in little glass jars.
Why bother growing them in space when you can bring them with you? Sounds like NASA is taking the long way around.
I can create them there.
I can create them anywhere!
I will not evolve them in a house
I will not evolve them with a mouse
I do not like space genes of man
I do not like them Sam I am.
Yeah, so does this make more likely that we'll find extraterrestrial intelligences? I mean, we can't restrict out searches to just planets now.
I belong to the ______ generation.
I think this is proof against one of the arguments creationist wackos have been making for quite a long time. They always ask how can life be created out of nothing.. I seem to remember reading a while ago that another scientist conducted an experiment in which he applied electricity to a sort of cocktail of chemicals and he also managed to create amino acids- though admitedly this was not in a vacuum. Can't find a link, unfortunately.
Do we really need to waste time "competing" with religion to "prove" evolution?
Why can't we concentrate on science that matters. If they want to believe some fairy tale about a magical man with a long white beard that had a busy week, let them!
I've had enough abrasive sigs. Kittens are cute and fuzzy.
Until they under the same conditions:
1) create a protein
2) create a cell
3) make it a living cell.
Also notice that the headline used the word created?
You're using her as bait, Master!
Amino acids, so what? I will be excited when the explain how amino acids assemble themselves into something as complex as DNA.
So would I. Perhaps you should read your own signature. Nucleic acids assemble to DNA; amino acids make proteins.
-Sean
So will the rest of the scientific community!
Amino acids are the component parts of proteins, not DNA.
0xB
In the thrift store, I found a book, it's about a 6th grade level science book. It's called science for christians, it's from the 70s or so I think.
I think it may be worth something some day, most of the arguments it gives have already been invalidated by modern science.
Of course, it's all relative, the legitimate science text books printed today contain tons of inaccuracies and gross misstatements. I should have never tried to learn science as a kid from those books, I've had to throw away most of the knowledge after I learned the way things REALLY are.
I've had enough abrasive sigs. Kittens are cute and fuzzy.
So we create a certain environment that allows for certain amino acids to be detected, nevermind that you fail to mention WHICH amino acids. They reported that they were only able to detect glycine, alanine, and serine. Wow! Shebang! Huzzah! We have these three amino acids, this MUST mean that humans have evolved from some frozen water containing some basic molecules that was hit with some radiation into the extremely advanced and complex organisms that we are today; and that someway, somehow this little bit of water, radiation, and other basic molecules have given us emotions, cognitive proactive and reactive thoughts and actions, and intelligent analysis and thinking processes. The answer is most definitely here! Let us all succumb to these amazing amino acids and praise them for our existance (not to mention the at least 17 other amino acids that are critical for human existance).
i always figured someone should come along and sayy.. "we were created, and we(are) evolved(ing)"
;P
that way everyone is happy
the only fact is that everything is an opinion
Nope. The point is gone. Proteins are just lots of amino acids, connected by single bonds. The hard part is getting all those constituent atoms to form into the relatively complex amino acids. Then just string the amino acids along and see what you get. True, getting functional proteins that can actually (for example) catalyze a chemical reaction is pretty unlikely when you're just randomly creating proteins by strining aa's together. But remember, not only do you you have most of the history of the universe in which to do it in, but these results suggest that the reactions can take place within most of the area of the universe (ie - deep space). That's a LOT of time, and a LOT of area. It makes me wonder why there isn't MORE life out there, actually.
4-star general in a one-man army.
I already replied to one of these 'out of the blue' jabs, but it was lost - so here it is again for this other jab.
So we create a certain environment that allows for certain amino acids to be detected, nevermind that you fail to mention WHICH amino acids. They reported that they were only able to detect glycine, alanine, and serine. Wow! Shebang! Huzzah! We have these three amino acids, this MUST mean that humans have evolved from some frozen water containing some basic molecules that was hit with some radiation into the extremely advanced and complex organisms that we are today; and that someway, somehow this little bit of water, radiation, and other basic molecules have given us emotions, cognitive proactive and reactive thoughts and actions, and intelligent analysis and thinking processes. The answer is most definitely here! Let us all succumb to these amazing amino acids and praise them for our existance (not to mention the at least 17 other amino acids that are critical for human existance).
There is a great deal of doubt whether the mixture of gases used in this experiment actually existed on earth: it assumes a reducing atmosphere, among other things that geology does not tell us.
More than one geologist, in fact, has noted that the only reason that they believe that there ever was a reducing atmosphere on Earth is because life is obviously here and the basic building blocks couldn't form in the presence of Oxygen.
At the same time, however, those amino acids couldn't form without the presence of an ozone layer--which requires free oxygen.
This is interesting and intriguing because it shows how these blocks could form in deep space and then arrive on Earth--since we already know that they can remain intact in their descent through the atmosphere.
It still doesn't even come *close* to answer the criticisms levied against abiogenesis (the formation of proteins, functional alleles, &c), but it is interesting and extremely significant over the Urey-Miller experiment.
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What do you expect NASA to do? The only people who aren't pissed at them for wasting tons of money are the people pissed at them for not doing anything they're interested in.
It's like this: You give them 40 billion, and we'll go to Mars.
A bit of relevance... This does not disprove God. Christianity is based on faith. The whole system is based on faith. Were we to have ANY proof that God exists, we no longer need faith, and so the system would fail. Therefore, if God exists and He is all powerful, He would have hidden all traces of his existence and acts in order to preserve the need for faith. So there will always be a rational explanation. Case in point: amino acids formed.
By the way, I'm an agnostic communist with Zen and Tibetan Buddhist sympathies. Thought that might be interesting.
-Skeld
Amino acids don't make DNA. Amino acids make protein. Check your facts.
Here is how protein is made:
Base pairs (adenine, guanine, cytosine, thymine) self-assemble into DNA. If you put base pairs together, they will assemble, all completely by themselves. Base pairs are 2 bases (adenine and thymine, or guanine and cytosine) connected to eachother by hydrogen bonds. These base pairs are connected to other base pairs by alternating deroxyribose and phosphates.
Now, BTW, I haven't mentioned this important bit: DNA and RNA are divided into sections called codons. These are 3 base pairs that code for a particular protein.
DNA can catylise single-stranded mRNA. The DNA splits, and an RNA molecule forms on each strand of DNA. RNA is the same as DNA except it is single stranded and instead of Thymine it has Uricil. Now when the RNA molecule forms on the DNA, it makes a perfect anti-copy of the DNA.
They split, and the 2 single DNA strands recombine. Then the mirror-image mRNA binds to tRNA codons, and this creates a perfect copy of the original DNA, at least in respect to protein coding.
Now, if you have digested that, I will talk about how the protein is actually made:
Now the tRNA is at the ribosome, which is the protein manufacturing organelle of a cell.
Amino acids from around the cell then bind to their respective corresponding codons. This eventualy forms a protein chain. All our DNA does is make protein. That is how all life is made.
If you don't understand any of my sayings, come to me in private and I shall take you in my German mouth.
mmmmm deep-space
I am not a creationist.
Several posters have said this.
I'll be charitable and guess that they are "Intelligent Design" advocates.
How can we know that the odds against life occurring "are too great"? We are talking about a process we don't understand. Any guess regarding odds can only be a guess. And the fact of the matter is that we are all here... Ergo, life was created somehow or other. See TalkOrigins for more on the odds of life et al).
Conclusion 1: All the evidence is that life was created by natural processes. We don't know exactly how.
Nothing in that precludes the existence of "god". If a natural process created life, then surely it would be "his" natural process...
What IDer's attempt to argue is that the creation of life "requires" or "proves" not only (a) that god exists; but also (b) that he is a "conservative" christian god. It does nothing of the sort.
If there was any scientific evidence whatsoever of "design" in the building blocks of life - as the IDer's favorite Michael Behe suggests - it would be like finding a black monolith on the moon (as in "2001"). Behe has found nothing of the sort.
Conclusion 2: "Intelligent Design" theory goes nowhere (a) to proving the existence of god(s); or (b) to proving anything about his/her/its/their nature.
PTET
Nope. The point is gone. Proteins are just lots of amino acids, connected by single bonds. The hard part is getting all those constituent atoms to form into the relatively complex amino acids.
As a protein/organic chemist, I say to you: why don't you try making that single bond? It's quite hard when you don't have a ribosome to do all the work for you.
Stanley Miller has been making amino acids (granted, the wrong way) since 1955. And he didn't even have his doctorate yet. Raw amino acids are easy- what's difficult is selecting the proper stereochemistry (amino acids have mirror images which are chemically identical but structurally different- life only uses one of the two mirror images (enantiomers)). If you condense the wrong enantiomer, or both enantiomers simultaneously, you get garbage out. Same problem with nucleic acids to DNA. In the end, this report is plagued with the same problems that Stanley Miller faced in 1955, sorry kids, deep space (or almost every other non-biological natural chemical synthesis) doesn't care about symmetry.
If you're interested in a brief history of Miller, why he's wrong, and what we think now, see my other post.
However, recent research suggests that there is an excess of L-amino acids (the specific enantiomer used in life-proteins) in amino acids found in space, which further suggests that the shuttling of amino acids from space via meteorites and comets could have led to pre-biotic proteins on planet Earth.
...
From the article:
Recently it has been discovered that an excess of L-amino acids is present in the Murchison and Murray meteorites indicating that a preference for L-amino acids existed in solar system material before there was life on Earth. This supports an idea, first proposed by Rubenstein et al. (1983, Nature 306, 118), for an extraterrestrial origin for homochirality.
In this model the action of circular polarized light on interstellar chiral molecules introduced a left handed excess into molecules in the material from which the solar system formed.
If our own solar system formed in such a region of high circular polarization, it could have led to the excess of L-amino acids which we see in meteorites and to the homochirality of biological molecules. It is possible that without such a process operating it would not be possible for life to start. This may have implications for the frequency of occurrence of life in the universe.
The money isn't wastet. The scientists (and all the other ppl around there) get the money. And if the pay thousands for a pice of electronic, some body has to build it. Since even scientists need sth to eat etc. they spend the money say to the pizza boy -- and what would the pizza boy do, if there were no NASA scientists. ;-)
..that glycine, alanine and serine, the amino acids formed, are three of the smallest and structurally less energy-consuming amino acids?
You do not exist. Go away.
The bible is the word of god. Therefore god hasn't hidden all traces of itself. therefore god doesn't exist.
Ah, but the bible could be the work of a raving madman (or a raving science-fiction author) in which case faith is still required. As long as there is a possible reasonable explanation other than God existing, the system can still sort of work. Which happens to make it pretty much impossible to prove it one way or the other.
In other words, you are an authoritarian theocrat.
Well... it's more like "free stuff for everyone without hurting anyone and just confuse the hell out of anyone who gets in your way." Zen's fun stuff, btw. An assault on logic.
-Skeld
Mark me offtopic, thanks. I need a reason to earn more karma since I'm stuck at 50.But I just have to express my gratitude to ontopic posters on every story that add more depth and intelligent commentary than I could get from any other media source. It's worth putting up with the trolls and whiners just to read intelligent, cogent discourse about sci/tech news stories. And invariably there'll be a story where I can offer the same, based on my own areas of expertise.
And finally, to stay on topic, how do these results bear on the theories that DNA first evolved as a result of clay formations that allowed chain-like molecules to aggregate due to the clays' microscopic self-organisation of surface structures? It seemed to me that this was the catalyst for the formation of amino acids and DNA/RNA. Now that's all called into question.
Great story, great comments. All around thought provoking.
Also, [how or] can we do spectroscopic analyses to find amino acids in the matter surrounding other star systems? That would be a fascinating next line of inquiry.
And finally, if I weren't reading /. drunk, I might phrase my questions better... OK, for that reason alone I'm checking off the "No score +1 bonus" here.
I can see the fnords!
However, they did have a very interesting article from taken from Harpers Magazine, about how the Old Testament is exactly what many people have suspected, a typical myth in the tradition of Greek and Roman and Norse myths. There is no evidence supporting much of the Bible, but plenty of evidence to support the Old Testament being cobbled together at a certain point of time after the supposed incidents it mentions. In fact, there is a passage in the Old Testament that mentions old texts being found in a temple that were thought to have been long lost. Long lost, or just written?
Microsoft - Where would you like to go today, Maybe Jail?
Hmmm, I wonder how many of some of the things we consider indispensable to modern life and commerce came as a result of NASA and "irrelevant" research in general.
Although I agree that it seems like there are more pressing issues here on Earth...I bet you were one of the kids who was always whining about having to learn math.
Another poster has done a fabulous job of critiquing your post, so I'll leave the vast majority of it alone--partly because it is too much of a pain to break down without carriage returns.
/then/ write.
Anyways, just one question for you.
Where in this universe did you get the idea that I was critiquing micro or macro evolution?
I was discussing abiogenesis, also known as Chemical Evolution.
The proper order is read
Integrate Keynote and LaTeX
Did you read the link about chirality? They address this very issue off the "more questions" page. Here is the link.
...phil
"For a list of the ways which technology has failed to improve our quality of life, press 3."
Put lots of energy in to break everything apart and hope the bits come together in the right way with a means to carry off the excess energy (so the acids stay together)
And if they don't come all the way apart, how do you know?
Every square centimeter of every piece of lab equipment everywhere on the planet is covered in bacteria and virii. Merely killing the little critters is not enough for this type of experiment to be valid. Their bodies must be done away with. All amino acid and amino acid fragments must be removed. Not 99% removed. Not 99.9999% removed. Everything must be gone. Otherwise, all you're showing is that:
Raw material + energy + amino acids -> amino acids
instead of
Raw material + energy -> amino acids
Until all organic compounds are removed from the system (which we can't do), claims of creating spontaneous amino acids are invalid. In fact, the only thing that these experiments demonstrate is how difficult it is to wipe them out.
"I'm not impatient. I just hate waiting." - My Dad
"More than one geologist, in fact, has noted that the only reason that they believe that there ever was a reducing atmosphere on Earth is because life is obviously here and the basic building blocks couldn't form in the presence of Oxygen."
The presence of large deposits of banded-iron formations indicate that reducing conditions probably did exist during some periods. These deposits suggest alternating periods of reducing (oxygen-free) and then oxidizing (oxygen present) atmospheres over time.
IIRC, some of the Hibbing range deposits are BIF's.
...should always be prefaced with "as we know it". No one would have predicted thermophilic bacteria dependent on hydrogen sulfide-based metabolism, bacteria that live off of oil and other toxic chemicals, etc., algae that live in icepacks We tend to think in too-narrow of terms. Granted, it is all we know, but it's just another form of "flat earth" thinking.
You seem to have missed the point. NASA's experiment was by no means a carbon copy. The original Miller-Urey experiment was in a simulated atmosphere with electric arcs. The NASA experiment was in simulated DEEP SPACE, with radiation. It's the difference between an early earth-like environment and the depths of the universe. If you really think the two are similar, then I guess moving your house to deep space wouldn't be much of an inconvenience, eh?
I can tell from your comments that you don't understand science well. Or at the very least, you're a Popular Scientist that thinks they know everything about science. Well, I'm sorry, but science doesn't work the way you want it to. Discoveries proceed by increments, not by leaps and bounds. Sure, I'd be impressed if someone synthesized a biologically important protein from scratch. But I'd also be INCREDIBLY doubtful, since it would mean the researchers ignored all the preliminary work that needed to be done and just jumped in randomly.
You keep thinking of proteins as millions of chemical bonds, which they are. But behind those millions of chemical bonds are amino acids, which are themselves about 20-30 bonds. So this NASA experiment shows that those relatively complex 20-30 bond components can be made in deep space. After that, just use a single bond to string them together. Do that enough times, and you've got a protein. Maybe not a functional protein, but a protein nonetheless. Repeat billions and billions of times over the history/area of the universe, and maybe you'll end up with something useful.
4-star general in a one-man army.
Is the set of 17 amino acids in use on Earth-based life a privledged set? As in, are there any possible substitutes? Or could the set reasonably be expanded or contracted? I'm presuming size, composition, polarity and electronegativity are all limitations.
So long and thanks for all the fish . . . !!!
What does it mean for the body building world ? The slashdot.org reader may not be so familier with this, but body builders suppliment their nutrition with fatty starch and Amino Acids.
Phil Reeds short reply - attacking your gross misrepresentations about benificial mutations having never been observed - aside; your post - and the one you are defending - overlook gross mathematical innaccuracies in this attack on scientific abiogenesis. Ok, he has calculated that the odds for a fully functional cell forming is about 10^440 - that number only holds if you put a few chemicals in a box and shake, expecting a cell to miraculously just fall together. Abiogenesis makes no such claims; nor, in fact, does evolution. Rather, evolution only states that very simple, primitive, only marginally efficient organisms can improve over generations; and that even small increments of improvement are strongly favored, and can add up (over time) to very large improvements. What is more, you can build on the sucesses, and discard the failures - this shortens the required time amazingly.... Behold, the power of Natural Selection! For that matter, evolution doesn't require cells, organelles, DNA, or any other bit of molecular biology that you care to point to - all it requires is something replicating (however poorly) and competing for resources to carry on that replication; it does nothing to explain the origins of life itself - that is the domain of the closely related feild of Abiogenesis. The currently favored model (to my knowledge) there doesn't even bring DNA or proteins into the picture until fairly late - this is called the RNA World hypothesis and it really does seem to be pretty good. And keep in mind that Abiogenesis only has to have very few, very limited successes to get to all life as we know it; we don't have to put chemicals in a box and shake until a horse drops out, then a pig, then a fish, then a human.... Just one success can succeed for all of us.. html
As to creationism - please don't try to advocate it; for the Fundamentalist Christian Young Earth Creationism to work, ALL of science has to be mangled into utter unintelligibility. Cosmology, astronomy, physics, chemistry, biology, geology, paleontology, archeology, meteorology, and all their (very useful) subfields - must be dismissed as garbage in order to force the world-veiw that YE Creationism demands. Not only that, but all the problems that you present for abiogenesis plague your "Creator" - did it simply arise by chance? What are the odds there? Ha - shake that box until a supreme being drops out, but you'll be here a long time - remember, the creator isn't allowed to have evolved by natural selection! Nope, Creationism is just too much to have to swallow.
I'm sure I should have been a little less inflamatory, sorry. I realize that probability is something that is very difficult for the human mind - intuition is NOT to be trusted here - and that there are a few Creationism advocates who are intellectually dishonest enough to have inflicted this faulty reasoning upon you under their guise of 'authority'. Not your fault at all. Incidently, this link:
http://www.talkorigins.org/origins/faqs-qa
also leads (eventually) to several Creationist resources; good luck in your digging.
I have no Sig.
Cut and pasted from "Five Major Misconceptions about Evolution" from http://www.talkorigins.org/origins/faqs-qa.html
"The theory of evolution says that life originated, and evolution proceeds, by random chance."
There is probably no other statement which is a better indication that the arguer doesn't understand evolution. Chance certainly plays a large part in evolution, but this argument completely ignores the fundamental role of natural selection, and selection is the very opposite of chance. Chance, in the form of mutations, provides genetic variation, which is the raw material that natural selection has to work with. From there, natural selection sorts out certain variations. Those variations which give greater reproductive success to their possessors (and chance ensures that such beneficial mutations will be inevitable) are retained, and less successful variations are weeded out. When the environment changes, or when organisms move to a different environment, different variations are selected, leading eventually to different species. Harmful mutations usually die out quickly, so they don't interfere with the process of beneficial mutations accumulating.
Nor is abiogenesis (the origin of the first life) due purely to chance. Atoms and molecules arrange themselves not purely randomly, but according to their chemical properties. In the case of carbon atoms especially, this means complex molecules are sure to form spontaneously, and these complex molecules can influence each other to create even more complex molecules. Once a molecule forms that is approximately self-replicating, natural selection will guide the formation of ever more efficient replicators. The first self-replicating object didn't need to be as complex as a modern cell or even a strand of DNA. Some self-replicating molecules are not really all that complex (as organic molecules go).
Some people still argue that it is wildly improbable for a given self-replicating molecule to form at a given point (although they usually don't state the "givens," but leave them implicit in their calculations). This is true, but there were oceans of molecules working on the problem, and no one knows how many possible self-replicating molecules could have served as the first one. A calculation of the odds of abiogenesis is worthless unless it recognizes the immense range of starting materials that the first replicator might have formed from, the probably innumerable different forms that the first replicator might have taken, and the fact that much of the construction of the replicating molecule would have been non-random to start with.
(One should also note that the theory of evolution doesn't depend on how the first life began. The truth or falsity of any theory of abiogenesis wouldn't affect evolution in the least.)
It's a great resource. Check it out.
I have no Sig.
try a little reading at http://www.talkorigins.org/origins/faqs-qa.html
G ood stuff.
The problem with literal Genesis creation (whether followed by a period of evolution or not) is that it requires the mangling of every science you care to name to make it work; further since what we know scientifically does work today, it requires the "Creator" to have gone to tremendous extra effort to decieve us. Why do we think the universe is about 16 billion years old? Astronomy and the speed of light, so god had to fake the old light... why do we think the Earth is about 4.5 Billion years old? Cosmology (the main sequence of stars, the Big Bang with inflation) and Geology (RadioIsotope dating, stratigraphy, plate tectonics, paleo magnetic traces...) and again, all this evidence had to be deliberatly falsified by the creator. These are more than just a few little fibs, they are grand LIES of universal scope.
I'd find the absence of such a Creator tremendously comforting.
I have no Sig.
Hey, if you are going to 'interpret' the time scale (ie, say that that tiny bit O' Genesis isn't literal) then don't stop there! Render the whole thing non-literal... After all, the sun isn't created until the fourth day (same time as the moon, and all the other 'lights of the sky' - planets, stars, etc) making it and everything else in the universe younger than the Earth. Not to mention that it (and all the 'lights') are firmly afixed to the 'Firmament'. Not to mention that all the birds and sea creatures were created on the fifth (several thousand or million year long - remember?) day; this includes owls right? Ok.. so their prey animals (mice) weren't created until the sixth day.... What did all those predatory birds EAT? Or how about plants (Third day) that require birds or even insects for seed spreading and pollination?
i t's a great place to start in the whole E/C debate, and yes - there are links to both sides of the issue there. Night Night
And then there's the whole Noachian flood fiasco. Trust me on this - don't try for literal Young Earth Creationism, it's just too much to swallow.
Look, I could go on, and probably get into some cheap shots at Creationism in truly poor taste - so I'll just stop now. But please check out this link: http://www.talkorigins.org/origins/faqs-qa.html
I have no Sig.
This only replicates experiments done long ago. Amino acids are nothing. No one has made a protein in this manner yet.
End universe now? _Yes _No
The Law of Falling Bodies