We Have Even More Evidence Life's Building Blocks Came to Earth From Space

We don't know how the first life came about. A new study of carbon-rich meteorites has added weight to the idea that the building blocks came here from space.

A team of scientists from Hokkaido University in Japan used new, extremely sensitive analysis techniques to detect organic compounds that form the very core of the nucleic acid molecule common to all life as we know it.

The researchers analyzed three meteorites, including the Murchison meteorite which landed in Australia in 1969 and the Murray meteorite which landed in Kentucky in 1950.

The meteorites that hit our planet are old space rocks, which are likely to have been around in the early stages of the Solar System.

Carbon-rich meteorites have a lot of organic compounds. The bits that stack together form the long chains of genetic information and are the compounds we are most interested in when it comes to the emergence of DNA and RNA on Earth.

pyrimidines and purines are the two main classes of nucleobases. The authors of the new study were able to detect several pyrimidines in their meteorite samples that had previously escaped detection thanks to the incredible sensitivity of their analysis techniques.

The team writes that they detected a wide variety of pyrimidine nucleobases and their structuralisomers from both extracts.

The images are from chromatos.

Experiments that had mimicked the contents of space materials had suggested the presence of various nucleobases out there, and that these classes of organic compounds are ubiquitously present in extraterrestrial environments.

Why are these compounds so important? There is a sugar-phosphate chain in the strands of DNA andRNA. In the helix-shaped ladder, the sugars are formed in specific ways by the genes.

The Wikimedia Commons/CC BY-SA 3.0 is available.

The types of hydrogen bonds that pyrimidine and purine can form are what makes them bind together. The ratio of purine and pyrimidine is always the same.

The formation of the Solar System would have created photochemical reactions among the various materials kicking around in space.

The building blocks could have been delivered to our planet via meteorite impacts during the late heavy bombardment period of early Earth, according to the authors.

The chemical evolution of the Earth's primordial stage is thought to have been aided by the influx of such organics.

sample missions to asteroids Bennu and Ryugu will give us more insight into this idea.

Researchers can use the uncontaminated samples to establish if the molecules were brought here by meteorites. We cannot wait.

Nature Communications published the research.