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Adapted from "swampyWater3" by mconnors / morgueFile |
Riddle-solving researchers from the University of Cambridge “may have solved origin-of-life conundrum,” announced a recent headline. They propose a scenario by which life’s essential chemical building blocks could have been produced simultaneously, providing the raw material for life to evolve. John Sutherland’s Cambridge team resolved this foundational chemical conundrum using simple molecules they contend would have been deposited on the early Earth by heavy meteorite bombardment.You can read the entire article by clicking on "Attempts to Trace Life Back to Chemical Origins Still Maps the Willful Ignorance of the Hunters".
“The key thing about the network is that although it looks complicated, it’s all the same reactions,” Sutherland explains. From hydrogen cyanide, hydrogen sulfide, phosphates, and of course water, the organic building blocks of many important biological molecules can form. The same sorts of reactions, using various metallic catalysts, can produce 12 amino acids, nucleotides, and a lipid precursor. Thus, using the sun’s energy, it is possible to generate many of the simple molecules from which the far more complex biochemical molecules comprising living cells are built. That would “only” leave the problem of getting those molecules to assemble and organize themselves into living cells, but more on that later.
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