Mar 1, 2024 07:57 PM
(This post was last modified: Mar 1, 2024 08:01 PM by C C.)
https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-e...EsR-b4JKLA
INTRO: People have long scratched their heads trying to understand how life ever got going after the formation of Earth billions of years ago. Now, chemists have partly unlocked the recipe by creating a complex compound essential to all life — in a lab.
Like making the ingredients of a cake, researchers have successfully created a compound critical for metabolism in all living cells, which is essential for energy production and regulation. The pathway, which has evaded scientists for decades, involved relatively simple molecules probably present on early Earth that combined at room temperature over months.
The discovery provides support to the idea that many key components for life could have simultaneously formed early on and combined to make living cells.
“Why do we have life? Why do the rules of chemistry mean life here looks the way it does?” said Matthew Powner, senior author of the research paper. These are “just the most fantastic questions we could possibly answer.”
[...] he new lab experiment focused on the origins of another primary metabolite: coenzyme A, which sits at the heart of metabolism across all domains of life (as one of its many functions)...
[...] The simple recipe for such a complex-looking molecule could reimagine how life started on Earth. Historically, Powner said, scientists proposed that biological molecules appeared stepwise — like an early world of RNA that later gave rise to proteins and other chemicals.
But the new discovery shows that many of life’s building blocks could have been created simultaneously from the same basic chemicals and conditions, producing proteins, RNA and other components at once... (MORE - missing details)
INTRO: People have long scratched their heads trying to understand how life ever got going after the formation of Earth billions of years ago. Now, chemists have partly unlocked the recipe by creating a complex compound essential to all life — in a lab.
Like making the ingredients of a cake, researchers have successfully created a compound critical for metabolism in all living cells, which is essential for energy production and regulation. The pathway, which has evaded scientists for decades, involved relatively simple molecules probably present on early Earth that combined at room temperature over months.
The discovery provides support to the idea that many key components for life could have simultaneously formed early on and combined to make living cells.
“Why do we have life? Why do the rules of chemistry mean life here looks the way it does?” said Matthew Powner, senior author of the research paper. These are “just the most fantastic questions we could possibly answer.”
[...] he new lab experiment focused on the origins of another primary metabolite: coenzyme A, which sits at the heart of metabolism across all domains of life (as one of its many functions)...
[...] The simple recipe for such a complex-looking molecule could reimagine how life started on Earth. Historically, Powner said, scientists proposed that biological molecules appeared stepwise — like an early world of RNA that later gave rise to proteins and other chemicals.
But the new discovery shows that many of life’s building blocks could have been created simultaneously from the same basic chemicals and conditions, producing proteins, RNA and other components at once... (MORE - missing details)
