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TOPIC: Ingredients for life
Blobrana


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The right comet chemistry points to life throughout the universe
The possibility that life started in space, and could be common throughout the universe, has taken a leap with the discovery of crucial chemistry in a comet.
A robot space probe that returned to Earth in January 2006, after a visit to Comet Wild 2, brought back glycine, an amino acid that is a fundamental building block of proteins - and life - NASA scientists have announced.

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Blobrana


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Building block of life found in comet



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Blobrana


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Glycine
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How comets 'bring life' when they collide with planets
Scientists have discovered evidence that comets may sow the seeds of life when they collide with planets.
The protein component glycine was found in samples of dust and ice from comet Wild 2 brought back to Earth by a U.S. spacecraft.
Glycine is one of 20 amino acids which join up in chains to create the chemical building blocks of all living organisms.

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Blobrana


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Building block of life found on comet
The amino acid glycine, a fundamental building block of proteins, has been found in a comet for the first time, bolstering the theory that raw ingredients of life arrived on Earth from outer space, scientists said on Monday.

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Ingredient for life detected in comet dust
It is the first time an amino acid has turned up in comet material, bolstering the idea that the building blocks of biology are 'ubiquitous' in space.
Showing that the ingredients for life in the universe may be distributed far more widely than previously thought, scientists have found traces of a key building block of biology in dust snatched from the tail of a comet.

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Blobrana


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Could comet strikes be spreading seeds of life?
Comets have been blamed for a lot of death and destruction over the years. Showers of them are thought to have triggered at least one and maybe even several of the major and minor mass-extinction events that have wiped out millions of species in the 4 billion years since life on earth first began.
But new research from the University of Washington defends comets, those gassy balls of ice and dust that swing by earth every once in a while to show off their tails. Doctoral student Nathan Kaib ran some data that suggests that the number of comets available to rain down on earth from time to time has been hugely overestimated.

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Blobrana


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Evidence of liquid water in comets reveals possible origin of life
Comets contained vast oceans of liquid water in their interiors during the first million years of their formation, a new study claims. The watery environment of early comets, together with the vast quantity of organics already discovered in comets, would have provided ideal conditions for primitive bacteria to grow and multiply. So argue Professor Chandra Wickramasinghe and his colleagues at the Cardiff Centre for Astrobiology in a paper published in the International Journal of Astrobiology.

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Blobrana


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Origin of Life
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Title: Origin of Life
Authors: Ashwini Kumar Lal

The evolution of life has been a big enigma despite rapid advancements in the field of astrobiology, astrophysics and genetics in recent years. The answer to this puzzle has been as mindboggling as the riddle relating to evolution of Universe itself. Despite the fact that panspermia has gained considerable support as a viable explanation for origin of life on the Earth and elsewhere in the Universe, the issue however, remains far from a tangible solution. This paper examines the various prevailing hypotheses regarding origin of life like abiogenesis, RNA(ribonucleic acid) world, iron-sulphur world, panspermia, and concludes that delivery of life-bearing organic molecules by the comets in the early epoch of the Earth alone possibly was not responsible for kickstarting the process of evolution of life on our planet.

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Blobrana


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Could Life Be 12 Billion Years Old?
Much of the search for life outside of Earth's biological oasis has focused on examining the conditions on the other planets in our solar system and probing the cosmos for other Earth-like planets in distant planetary systems.
But one team of astronomers is approaching the question of life elsewhere in the universe by looking for life's potential beginning.
Aparna Venkatesan, of the University of San Francisco, and Lynn Rothschild, of NASA's Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, California, are using models of star formation and destruction to determine when in the roughly 13.7 billion-year history of the universe the biogenic elements - those essential to life as we know it - might have been pervasive enough to allow life to form.

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Blobrana


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Homochirality
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Although Captain Kirk and crew could zip over to a planet at warp speed and teleport down to the surface to check if it was inhabited, current-day scientists will generally have to search for life from a distance. New research gives some hope that we could detect a "handedness" beacon from a planet full of microbes.
This handedness, or homochirality, is characteristic of life on Earth. The molecules that make proteins and DNA all have either a left-handed or right-handed orientation. Both orientations are made in equal quantities by non-biological processes, but life prefers to have just one type of hand over the other.

"Homochirality is a fundamental aspect of self-replication. It is a reasonable proposition that life on other planets will exhibit a particular handedness" - William Sparks of the Space Telescope Science Institute.

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Blobrana


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Scientists at The University of Manchester have developed an experiment that sheds new and fascinating light on how life on Earth might have begun.
Prof John Sutherland, Matthew Powner and Dr Beatrice Gerland from The School of Chemistry have broken new ground by synthesising almost from scratch two of the four building blocks of RNA, which is the self-replicating molecule that many scientists believe could be the original molecule for life.
The researchers believe they have shown how it was possible to make all the building blocks of RNA - which can carry and transmit information from one generation to the next - from the simple chemicals that would have existed on Earth four billion years ago.

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