The origins of how life on Earth arose remains a deep existential and scientific mystery. It’s long been theorized that our planet’s plentiful oceans could hold key to the secret. A new study from scientists at Purdue University could advance that idea one step further.
The paper published, on October 3 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), look at peptides: strings of amino acids that are important and tiny building blocks of protein and life itself. The authors found that amino peptides can spontaneously generate in droplets of water during the quick reactions that happen when water meets the atmosphere, such as when a waterfall crashes down to a rock and the spray is lifted into the air. It’s possible that this action happened when the Earth was a life-less, volcanic, watery, molten rock-filled planet about four billion years ago when life first began.
“This is essentially the chemistry behind the origin of life,” Graham Cooks, an author of the study and professor of analytical chemistry at Purdue, said in a press release. “This is the first demonstration that primordial molecules, simple amino acids, spontaneously form peptides, the building blocks of life, in droplets of pure water. This is a dramatic discovery.”
