Feb 1, 2018 01:19 AM
Did water-based life originate without water?
https://phys.org/news/2018-01-water-based-life.html
EXCERPT: When trying to understand the origins of life on Earth, researchers run into a paradox: while water is an indispensable solvent for all known life forms that exist today, water also inhibits the formation of string-like chains of nucleic acid polymers such as RNA that were likely precursors of life. This raises the question: how could the nucleic acids have formed in the first place? One solution to this "water paradox" is that life may have originated in something other than water, and only later adapted to the presence of water.
"We are fascinated by the possibility that water-based life may have originated without water at all," Zachary Adam, a researcher at Harvard University, told Phys.org.
Adam and others have been investigating a leading candidate for a water alternative called formamide, a clear liquid that consists of hydrogen, oxygen, carbon, and nitrogen. Not only does formamide favor polymer bond formation more than water does, it also reacts with other molecules to form nucleobases, amino acids, and some of the other basic compounds needed to make nucleic acids.
But there is a glaring problem with this proposal: formamide does not occur naturally in any significant quantity anywhere on Earth. Although formamide is widely used in industry as a solvent for making pharmaceuticals and pesticides, all of this formamide is synthetically produced.
Formamide does exist in space, however...
MORE: https://phys.org/news/2018-01-water-based-life.html
Robot with AI brain learns to evolve synthetic protocells
https://www.chemistryworld.com/news/robo...89.article
EXCERPT: . . . Now, Lee Cronin’s lab at the University of Glasgow, UK, has developed a robotic platform that makes different oil-in-water droplet formulations, analyses their behaviour, and then uses evolutionary algorithms and machine learning to predict and select behaviours. It can then evolve new and improved formulations for the next generation of droplets.
Cronin says the platform could be used to see how long it takes a system to become complex enough to have multiple co-existing traits and how these might then need to ‘invent’ a better chemical memory, akin to genetic instructions, to become life-like. ‘This would help tell us how pre-living systems were able to develop something as complex as the genomic and translation machinery of life,’ explains Cronin....
MORE: https://www.chemistryworld.com/news/robo...89.article
https://phys.org/news/2018-01-water-based-life.html
EXCERPT: When trying to understand the origins of life on Earth, researchers run into a paradox: while water is an indispensable solvent for all known life forms that exist today, water also inhibits the formation of string-like chains of nucleic acid polymers such as RNA that were likely precursors of life. This raises the question: how could the nucleic acids have formed in the first place? One solution to this "water paradox" is that life may have originated in something other than water, and only later adapted to the presence of water.
"We are fascinated by the possibility that water-based life may have originated without water at all," Zachary Adam, a researcher at Harvard University, told Phys.org.
Adam and others have been investigating a leading candidate for a water alternative called formamide, a clear liquid that consists of hydrogen, oxygen, carbon, and nitrogen. Not only does formamide favor polymer bond formation more than water does, it also reacts with other molecules to form nucleobases, amino acids, and some of the other basic compounds needed to make nucleic acids.
But there is a glaring problem with this proposal: formamide does not occur naturally in any significant quantity anywhere on Earth. Although formamide is widely used in industry as a solvent for making pharmaceuticals and pesticides, all of this formamide is synthetically produced.
Formamide does exist in space, however...
MORE: https://phys.org/news/2018-01-water-based-life.html
Robot with AI brain learns to evolve synthetic protocells
https://www.chemistryworld.com/news/robo...89.article
EXCERPT: . . . Now, Lee Cronin’s lab at the University of Glasgow, UK, has developed a robotic platform that makes different oil-in-water droplet formulations, analyses their behaviour, and then uses evolutionary algorithms and machine learning to predict and select behaviours. It can then evolve new and improved formulations for the next generation of droplets.
Cronin says the platform could be used to see how long it takes a system to become complex enough to have multiple co-existing traits and how these might then need to ‘invent’ a better chemical memory, akin to genetic instructions, to become life-like. ‘This would help tell us how pre-living systems were able to develop something as complex as the genomic and translation machinery of life,’ explains Cronin....
MORE: https://www.chemistryworld.com/news/robo...89.article