When droplets of water react with the air, life-starting things may happen.
“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
. “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.”In the study, the authors write that this discovery provides “a plausible route for the formation of the first biopolymers,” or the complex structures produced by living things.
Understanding this water-based chemistry circles back to the proteins that created life on Earth itself. Billions of years ago, the raw amino acids that built life are believed to have been. These amino acids reacted and clung together to form peptides, the building blocks of proteins and eventually life itself. However, a water molecule must be lost when the amino acids cling together for peptides to form. That’s not easy to do in a planet that is mostly covered in water.
The new study has taken a rare glimpse into the Earth’s early years, when nonliving compounds suddenly combined to form living things. This process of nonliving things giving rise to life called
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