Discover the secret ingredient of life.

in Popular STEM2 years ago

Discover the secret ingredient of life.



Souce wikimedia.org


A 2019 study and the experiments that prove it published just in May 2022 seem to finally answer the question, the recipe for life is surprisingly simple, you just need a few chemical compounds that were available on the early earth, volcanic rock, asteroids , which were super abundant and water.


The type of volcanic stone is the secret, you leave the mixture, react at room temperature and in a matter of hours you have polyribonucleic acids, what is necessary to start this incredible machine called life capable of evolving and growing in the most amazing diversity of shapes and sizes .



Souce wikipedia.org


Prebiotic Soil Before Life seemed to have the ingredients, but we still didn't know the recipe until now, in this study and its recently published in May this year, we discovered the secret ingredient that makes sense of the recipe.


The secret ingredient is volcanic rock or more specifically glassy rock, which means that it was formed as the product of liquid lava that cooled rapidly upon contact with water or an asteroid impact, in both cases the Rock melted upon cooling. it quickly formed glass, hence its name glassy rock.




Glass is an amorphous solid, this means that its molecular structure is disordered, unlike glass, whose origin is a slow and gradual cooling of lava and forms an ordered molecular structure.


The vitreous rocks of basalt, gabbro, andesite, diabase and nepheline were put to the test, the previous study suggested that with their chemical and structural characteristics they could act as a catalyst to convert ribonucleoside triphosphates, possible precursors of RNA that could exist naturally in the early land in polyribonucleic acids, which are capable of replicating and evolving, the broth was cooked in water at 25 degrees Celsius nothing special, for 20 hours and the result was surprising.



Souce wikipedia.org Souce wikipedia.org Souce wikipedia.org Gabbro, Diabase and Basalt Rocks

There were polyribonucleic acid chains between 100 and 300 nucleotides long, the nucleotide the chain segment, the sugar the phosphate and the nitrogenous base; it had been previously estimated that in order to evolve a chain had to be at least between 50 and 5000 nucleotides long, it was a good start because these long chains were present in all the glassy rocks of the test, the most successful being gabbro, diabase and basalt that produced them in greater quantity.


And no strings were found in the control sample that used quartz, a volcanic crystal, instead of glass, proving that the glassy rocks actually acted as a catalyst for the reaction; a catalyst reacts other compounds without running out so these reactions could continue indefinitely producing huge amounts of RNA continuously, therefore this process is efficient enough to make the best candidate to explain the origin of life, which It could have arrived much sooner than we thought.



Souce wikipedia.org


We know that conditions conducive to these reactions were already present on Earth 4.3 billion years ago, indicating that life may have begun when Earth was only 300 million years old, a baby on the planetary scale.


This experiment is undoubtedly a very big step to understand life on our planet, but also out there on other planets, if we find evidence of these ingredients that are surely present in Venus, Mars and the Moon, during their formation, but we do not find any evidence that life has existed in any of these places means that the earth is unique and that life on it is extremely rare.


But if we find evidence that there was life, no matter how small, in any of these places, it means that life is something extremely common and that it only needs these simple and abundant ingredients to appear again and again on planets with liquid water that do not exist. they are very close to their star or very far away, but to check this you have to go there and explore or send robots to do it, I don't care what happens first, it's fine for me.





Study Source


Study Source




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