A team of chemists from Purdue University in West Lafayette, Indiana have discovered a mechanism that could explain how the fundamental ingredients of living cells were first created in the unimaginably distant past. The scientists say this mechanism can produce peptides, the so-called “building blocks” of primordial life, from inorganic matter in ocean environments, where the first living microorganisms appeared approximately 3.7 billion years ago.
All the plant and animal life currently existing on the planet can be traced back to these incredibly distant beginnings, to the very first stirrings in the primordial soup . But significant questions remain about how exactly life formed from nothing, or more specifically from the mixture of non-living compounds that would have been found in ancient seas.
Secrets to understanding the origin of primordial life discovered in droplets from sea spray. ( Anton Maltsev / Adobe Stock)
The Origins of Primordial Life on Earth
In an article published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), Purdue University scientists explain that “conditions that permit the abiotic production of peptides in aqueous environments are a prerequisite for accepted origin-of-life chemistry.” Working from this premise, the biochemists were thrilled to discover what they term “a unique reactivity of free amino acids at the air-water interface of micron-sized water droplets that leads to the formation of peptide isomers on the millisecond…
