There was a critical point early in Earth's history when chemical reactions among the mix of organic molecules began to be powered from within, forming something we might start to think of as biological.
, but rather a reference to the protein's backbone, consisting of a chain of amino acids and two nitrogen atoms bonded to a pair of nickel atoms.
Not only could this discovery shed more light on the way that life began here on Earth, it could also give astronomers another clue in the search for life on other planets where these essential chemical ingredients are just beginning to form."Scientists believe that sometime between 3.5 and 3.
To get to their final peptide design, the scientists started with modern day proteins that power the metabolic processes crucial in driving so many biochemical reactions. Ancient proteins would have been much simpler, so these proteins were then broken down into their most basic parts. A series of experiments produced nickelback as a likely candidate for being simple enough to form on prebiotic Earth, but complex enough to take energy from the environment and do something with it. It uses a total of 13 amino acids; those molecules are often described as 'building blocks' for proteins and indeed for life itself.
To this basic scaffold, two nickel atoms could attach and mirror the basic activity of the nickel-iron group in
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