New research on volcanic glass has divided top origin-of-life researchers.
When life emerged, it did so quickly. Fossils suggest microbes were present 3.7 billion years ago, just a few hundred million years after the 4.5-billion-year-old planet had cooled enough to support biochemistry, and many researchers think the hereditary material for these first organisms was RNA. Although not as complex as DNA, RNA would still be difficult to forge into the long strands needed to convey genetic information, raising the question of how it could have spontaneously formed.
The result has divided top origin-of-life researchers. “This seems to be a wonderful story that finally explains how the nucleoside triphosphates react with each other to give RNA strands,” says Thomas Carell, a chemist at Ludwig Maximilians University of Munich. But Jack Szostak, an RNA expert at Harvard University, says he won’t believe the result until the research team better characterizes the RNA strands.
But RNA also brings headaches. No one has found a set of plausible prebiotic conditions that would cause hundreds of RNA letters—each of them complex molecules—to link into strands long enough to support the complex chemistry needed to ignite evolution. He sent samples of five different basalt glasses to the Foundation for Applied Molecular Evolution. There, Elisa Biondi, a molecular biologist, and her colleagues ground each sample into a fine powder, sterilized it, and mixed it with a solution of nucleoside triphosphates. Without a glass powder present, the RNA letters failed to link up. But when mixed with the glass powders,. No heat or light was needed. “All we had to do was wait,” Biondi says.
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