Scientists have found a potential building block for life in the Martian meteorite discovered in Antarctica. Parts of the stone contain rich concentrations of boron, which is suspected by biochemists of a decisive effect on the development of ribonucleic acid or RNA (read more about this development here).
“I read how important boron could be in the origin of life, stabilizing part of the RNA,” says biologist James Stevenson of the NASA Institute of Astrobiology .
RNA is a biological molecule, which, according to scientists, was a springboard for the development of life on Earth. Like DNA, that is, deoxyribonucleic acid that developed later, RNA can also store and transmit information to cells.
RNA consists of three main components - phosphate, ribose, which is a five-carbon sugar, and nucleotides. Phosphates and nucleotides were already in meteorites earlier. Ribose has never been detected outside the Earth.
“Of the three parts that make up RNA, ribose is the hardest part. We could not explain how it could have formed in a natural way. ”
In 2004, chemist Stephen Benner, together with the Gainesville Foundation for Applied Molecular Evolution, suggested that boros was a secret accomplice in ribose.
“If someone believes that life came from RNA that formed before biological life, we don’t know any other way to get enough ribose other than using boron,” Benner said.
“The boron has a unique size that can stabilize the ring structure of the ribose. No other element showed the same effect. "
After reading Benner’s work, Stevenson asked a geologist colleague if Martian meteorites on Earth were analyzed for boron. The answer was no, so Stevenson had to tackle the issue on his own.
The team hit the boron jackpot in the last hours of the allotted time allocated to work on a highly specialized ion microprobe at the University of Hawaii.
“We had four days to work on this expensive car, and for the first 3.5 days we did not see boron at all. We tried different meteorites and felt these meteorites in different places. And only in recent hours has the concentration of boron suddenly increased from 2-3 particles per million to 200 parts per million, ”said Stevenson.
“It was a surprise to all of us. We were about to give up. We worked 15 hours a day on this machine and did not find anything. And we were just about to leave, when we got this result - so I had to stay and work all night. ”
In the future, scientists plan to check whether earth clay with the same amount of boron as was found in the meteorite can stabilize ribose. It is far from a secret that clay could well become the main catalyst for the development of life on Earth.
Well, one more reason to speculate on the topic "can life be older than the Earth itself."
The article is based on materials .
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