"Now, scientists at Scripps Research have discovered a new set of chemical reactions that use cyanide, ammonia and carbon dioxide—all thought to be common on the early earth—to generate amino acids and nucleic acids, the building blocks of proteins and DNA."
Well, at first glance it just seems to be more "building blocks were widely available" news. It's long since been established
that some --
if not all, of life's prebiotic ingredients can be provided by the chemical activity of even the interstellar medium and the proto-solar environment.
But apparently a new, intriguing category of processes spurs optimism that something further might fall out of this Earthly combination. Bottom line is that -- given the vastly greater volume of random chemical interactions occurring on a primordial Earth for millions of years, it seems highly unlikely that a research lab's tiny, small-scale version of such operating through mere months, years, or decades could overcome the wall of statistical odds to yield similar eventually.
However, rather than that brute approach, I guess this is a quasi-inferential approach of poking, analyzing and calculating what assembly routes can be outputted by this "new set", and if any of those can lead directly or indirectly to primitive molecular self-replication or assisted slash reciprocal replication.
Because the new reaction is relatively similar to what occurs today inside cells—except for being driven by cyanide instead of a protein—it seems more likely to be the source of early life, rather than drastically different reactions, the researchers say. [...] "What we want to do next is continue probing what kind of chemistry can emerge from this mixture," says Krishnamurthy. "Can amino acids start forming small proteins? Could one of those proteins come back and begin to act as an enzyme to make more of these amino acids?"