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Transition Metal Catalysts Could Be Key To Origin of Life
An anonymous reader writes "One of the big, unsolved problems in explaining how life arose on Earth is a chicken-and-egg paradox: How could the basic biochemicals — such as amino acids and nucleotides — have arisen before the biological catalysts (proteins or ribozymes) existed to carry out their formation? In a paper appearing in the current issue of The Biological Bulletin, scientists propose that a third type of catalyst could have jumpstarted metabolism and life itself, deep in hydrothermal ocean vents."
It's great with fish.
The stuff has been cooking for the last thirty years, and no life has crawled out yet . . .
Hardly a surprise, since the real thing took as much as a billion years in a planet-sized beaker.
FWIW, I'm not sure the U-M experiments properly reflect our current understanding of the chemistry of the early earth, either.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
Well, I know everybody's just joking around here, but...
One of the more exciting papers I've read in this area appeared in Nature a little while back (14 May 2009). It shows not only that activated ribonucleotides could have been formed directly from simple molecules that were plausibly present on the early earth, but that the necessary reactions are of high yield, are catalyzed by inorganic phosphates, and take place under mild conditions. Because the ribonucleotides are formed as the phosphates ("activated"), they're suitable for polymerization to RNA under similarly mild conditions.
To me, this seals the deal for RNA the same way that Miller-Urey did for amino acids, and maybe even more so (because the reactions take place under ambient conditions, no lightning bolts needed). It's widely thought that early forms of life were based on RNA rather than DNA, so there you go. Now we just need to figure out how to make a ribosome.
See Powner et.al., "Synthesis of activated pyrimidine ribonucleotides in prebiotically plausible conditions," Nature 459, 239-242 (2009).
Sorry for the geekiness here, but of you know a little organic chemistry you'll find this really cool...