Old Materials Resurface For "Prebiotic Soup"

AliasMarlowe writes "Stanley Miller performed the famous experiments in the 1950s showing that amino acids and other building blocks for biomolecules could be produced by passing lightning through a mix of simple hydrocarbons, water vapor, and ammonia (thought at the time to approximate the Earth's early atmosphere). Other experiments approximated the environment around volcanic eruptions, but those results were not published. Following his death last year, a former student discovered the materials from those experiments, in labelled vials. Analysis of this material indicates that the conditions around volcanic eruptions (still thought to be representative of such events in the early Earth) resulted in a higher yield of amino acids than the simple lightning experiments, and resulted in a greater variety of amino acids." Pharyngula has a discussion of the Science paper, including a graph of the amino acids produced.

Comments

First cell walls

[spun]

Here's an interesting philosophical question. After the first autocatalytic sets and simple replicators, but before the first cell walls, was the entire Earth a single organism?

Amazing how much gets lost or forgotten

[NoNeeeed]

My tutor at university used to get us to produce reports on old papers from the really early days of compsci, the 50's and 60's.

What amazed me was how many great ideas were put forward which just couldn't have been implemented successfully at the time, and how many have turned up again many years later as "new" ideas.

There are many ideas that were invented decades ago, but people have just forgotten about.

It makes you wonder what great ideas and discoveries are lying hidden in old journals that no-one ever reads.

Warning: religious comment. Proceed with caution.

[Bovius]

I would say this is another potential blow to young-Earth creationists, but I think most of them aren't going to give this particular experiment much credit. It's unfortunate that we can't just look at the results of scientific experiments at face value without requiring a religious interpretation tacked on to the end. We'd all get along much better that way. Theists could do generally accepted scientific study without getting discredited for their beliefs. On the other hand, enough science already goes on with predetermined goals in mind, so maybe it's a moot point.

Disclaimer: I am a creationist, although not a young-Earth creationist, and I don't disagree with most of the tenets of evolution. I won't engage in debate over the merits of evolutionist vs. creationist perspectives, because there's little to no meaningful debate to be had. At this point, both sides of the debate are taking whatever evidence comes up and claiming it supports their perspective.

In other words, don't expect me to argue over the existence of God in this thread. Interesting findings, though!

Re:Spontaneous existance of life

[looseBits]

Yes, the original pre-biotic soup of life likely contained a bunch of RNA/DNA pre-cursor nucleotides as well as amino acids, sugars and who knows what else. I'm sure many different self-replicating molecules competed for these pre-cursors but according to the RNA-World hypothesis, RNA was able to out-compete other strategies (RNA it turns out does a halfway decent job of storing genetic information as well as catalyzing reactions). The theory goes that RNA eventually became the dominate self-replicating molecule and at some point these RNA molecules shifted the responsibility of storing genetic data to DNA (which is more stable and less prone to replication errors) and shifted enzymatic activity to proteins. I find this hypothesis fairly elegant as this kind of evolution explains RNA's current function in modern cells - as an intermediary between DNA and proteins. Also, that ribosomes still use RNA (rRNA) for enzymatic assembly of proteins with the help of tRNA to fetch the amino acids and mRNA to carry the genetic information from the DNA to the ribosomes. RNA's central role in the creation of proteins seems to imply it had the initial role of genetic storage and enzymes before it outsourced it to DNA and proteins.

I am sure there are plenty of instances since modern cells became prevalent of abiotic formation of complex molecules but they serve as nothing but a snack for modern bacteria.

Re:Ancient Atmosphere

[pclminion]

Cyanide is toxic because it disrupts aerobic respiration. Specifically it inhibits cytochrome C oxidase. I find it highly unlikely that A) primitive life was aerobic (in fact we KNOW it was not, since there was no free oxygen in the first place) and B) even if it was, that it would possess this enzyme. Calling cyanide an "antithesis" of life is a bit overboard.

The same argument goes for formaldehyde. Just because something is toxic to you or me doesn't necessarily mean it would be toxic to some extremely primitive life form. Generally life will make use of what is at hand. For all we know, early life DEPENDED on cyanide.

Re:Warning: religious comment. Proceed with cautio

[guruevi]

Why would it be a blow to anyone especially the loony creationists? This experiment, looking at it a few years later, didn't prove anything but that scientist also can be caught in hypes. Even 60 years later after these 'ideal' environments were defined and many more experiments with it, nothing more but amino acids have been created in a lab. To go from an amino acid to a single living cell is a big jump. A lot of those amino acids have to line up perfectly into things called RNA and DNA and then they have to all come together and somehow be jolted to life and THEN you have a single cell. Then that single cell has to be strong enough and survive long enough in that environment (whether it be lightning or volcanoes which are both very violent and tend to destroy stuff) it was created in and then it has to somehow figure out how to reproduce and in all that time, these 'ideal' environments have to calm down to a certain level so multi-celled organisms can survive.

This hypothesis has very little credibility now in the 'real' scientific world. It might still be in high school and college textbooks and some of you armchair scientists might know of them but the probability of it actually happening that way is so very low that even hardcore (read: religionist) evolutionists just look at it and say 'meh, let's look at something else'.