• Email Us: [email protected]
  • Contact Us: +1 718 874 1545
  • Skip to main content
  • Skip to primary sidebar

Medical Market Report

  • Home
  • All Reports
  • About Us
  • Contact Us

How Did Life Originate? There Are Hundreds Of “Recipes” It May Have Followed

September 21, 2023 by Deborah Bloomfield

The emergence of life on Earth is a mystery. What were the conditions that made it possible for life to happen here? We do not know. We also don’t know if those conditions are an absolute requirement or if there are different ways for life to come out of the inorganic universe. A group of researchers now think that there are hundreds of paths that life might have taken.

It all boils down to repeating chemical reactions, specifically self-sustaining repetition. Also known as autocatalysis, this requirement pushes all the possible combinations of chemical elements, the ingredients the universe has available, only towards specific reactions. And this new work suggests that there are more ways to mix them together.

Advertisement

“It was thought that these sorts of reactions are very rare. We are showing that it’s actually far from rare. You just need to look in the right place,” Betül Kaçar, a NASA-supported astrobiologist and University of Wisconsin–Madison professor of bacteriology, said in a statement. 

“We will never definitively know what exactly happened on this planet to generate life. We don’t have a time machine. But, in a test tube, we can create multiple planetary conditions to understand how the dynamics to sustain life can evolve in the first place.”

Kaçar and her team, led by postdoctoral researcher Zhen Peng, found 270 combinations of molecules with autocatalytic properties using elements across the periodic table. In particular, they were looking for comproportionation reactions. These produce multiple copies of the same molecules, and the more molecules that are produced, the faster the reaction gets.

“If those conditions are right, you can start with relatively few of those outputs. Every time you take a turn of the cycle you spit out at least one extra output which speeds up the reaction and makes it happen even faster,” co-author Zach Adam explained.

Advertisement

The authors have likened this approach to a recipe book. A recipe book that is more complex than expected. Not every one of these reactions might lead to life but the fact that there are many could imply that life might find many ways to emerge.

“Carl Sagan said if you want to bake a pie from scratch, first you must create the universe,” Kaçar said. “I think if we want to understand the universe, first we must bake a few pies.”

The research is published in the Journal of the American Chemical Society.

Deborah Bloomfield
Deborah Bloomfield

Related posts:

  1. Paris ramps up security as jihadist attacks trial starts
  2. Cricket-‘Western bloc’ has let Pakistan down, board chief says
  3. Analysis-Diverse boards to pick the next Boston and Dallas Fed bank chiefs
  4. Ancient Bison Found In Permafrost Is So Well Preserved Scientists Want To Clone It

Source Link: How Did Life Originate? There Are Hundreds Of "Recipes" It May Have Followed

Filed Under: News

Primary Sidebar

  • Unexpected Discovery Hints We Might Be Inside A Black Hole
  • Why Are People Talking About This “Square Structure” Captured On Mars?
  • The World Has Five Oceans, Not Four – Discover The Latest One
  • Just 80 Percent Of People Can Perceive This Optical Illusion And No One Knows Why
  • Something Other Than Geological Processes Or Humans Created These Caves
  • Can Black Holes Lead To Other Places In The Universe?
  • The Devastating Communication Problem Facing Light-Speed Travel
  • The Great British Pet Massacre: One Of The Saddest Tragedies Of 1939
  • Would A Vacuum-Filled Balloon Float?
  • Queen Ant Produces Babies Of 2 Different Species, For The First Time Ever We Have A Complete Map Of Brain Activity, And Much More This Week
  • Yes, Your Attention Span Might Have Shortened, But That Might Not Be A Terrible Thing
  • This May Be The First Known Portrait Of A Viking – And It’s A Sexually Rampant “Beard Fondler”
  • The Largest Snake In Captivity Is A Humongous 7.7-Meter Reticulated Python Called Medusa
  • Poo Power: How Animal Dung Could Unlock New Antibiotic Treatments
  • Perfectly Preserved Dinosaur Tail Found Inside 99-Million-Year-Old Amber Was Mistaken For A Plant
  • Why Aren’t Full Photos Of The Milky Way Real? A NASA Analyst Explains The Obvious
  • Freaky Ratfish Have Teeth Growing Out Of Their Foreheads, And They Use Them For Love
  • The Largest Turtle Ever Known To Have Lived Was An Absolute Unit
  • “It Literally Leapt Out Of The Rock At Us”: How Violent Storms Led To The Extraordinary Preservation Of Baby Pterosaurs
  • This Is The Reason Why Earth’s Core Exists, And It’s More Interesting Than You Might Think
  • Business
  • Health
  • News
  • Science
  • Technology
  • +1 718 874 1545
  • +91 78878 22626
  • [email protected]
Office Address
Prudour Pvt. Ltd. 420 Lexington Avenue Suite 300 New York City, NY 10170.

Powered by Prudour Network

Copyrights © 2025 · Medical Market Report. All Rights Reserved.

Go to mobile version