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+--- Thread: Article Alien life may evolve from radically different elements than human life did (/thread-14743.html)
Alien life may evolve from radically different elements than human life did - C C - Sep 29, 2023
https://www.livescience.com/space/extraterrestrial-life/alien-life-may-evolve-from-radically-different-elements-than-human-life-did
EXCERPT: ... A kind of chemical interaction that is key to life on Earth is known as autocatalysis. Autocatalytic reactions are self-sustaining — they can produce molecules that encourage the same reaction to happen again. Envision a growing population of rabbits. Pairs of rabbits come together, produce litters of new rabbits, and then the new rabbits grow up to pair off and make even more rabbits. It doesn't take many rabbits to soon have a lot more rabbits.
"One of the major reasons that origin-of-life researchers care about autocatalysis is because reproduction — a key feature of life — is an example of autocatalysis," Kaçar said. "Life catalyzes the formation of more life. One cell produces two cells, which can become four and so on. As the number of cells multiply, the number and diversity of possible interactions multiplies accordingly."
In the new study, researchers searched for autocatalysis beyond organic compounds. They reasoned that autocatalysis could help drive abiogenesis — the origin of life from lifelessness.
The scientists focused on what are called comproportionation cycles, which can generate multiple copies of a molecule. These products can be used as starting materials to help these cycles happen again, resulting in autocatalysis.
"Comproportionation is arguably unique because it is a single reaction that produces multiples of an output — it looks a lot like reproduction," study lead author Zhen Peng, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, told Space.com.
To find these reactions, the scientists analyzed more than two centuries of digitized scientific documents written in many different languages. "With effective language search and translation tools, we were able to design and conduct this first-of-its-kind assessment of the pervasiveness of autocatalytic cycles," study co-author Zach Adam, a geologist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, told Space.com.
Ultimately, the researchers discovered 270 different cycles of autocatalytic reactions. "Autocatalysis may not be that rare, but instead it might be a general feature of many different environments, even those that are really different from Earth," Kaçar said... (MORE - missing details)