Newcastle University research turns to ancient hot springs to explore the origins of life on Earth.
Published in the journal Communications Earth & Environment, their findings potentially reveal how some key molecules needed to produce life are made from inorganic chemicals, which is essential to understanding a key step in how life formed on the Earth billions of years ago.
Their results may provide a plausible genesis of the organic molecules that form ancient cell membranes that were perhaps selectively chosen by early biochemical processes on primordial Earth.
Fatty acids are long organic molecules that have regions that both attract and repel water that will automatically form cell-like compartments in water naturally, and it is these types of molecules that could have made the first cell membranes. Yet, despite their importance, it was uncertain where these fatty acids came from in the early stages of life.
One idea is that they might have formed in the hydrothermal vents where hot water, mixed with hydrogen-rich fluids coming from underwater vents, mixed with seawater containing CO2.
2024-01-13 03:00:04
Article from phys.org