How life originated on Earth remains a profound existential and scientific enigma. It has long been claimed that the abundant waters on our planet may hold the secret. A recent study by Purdue University scientists might take this concept one step further.
The article, published on October 3 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), examines peptides as essential and minute building blocks of protein and life. The scientists discovered that amino peptides could spontaneously form in water droplets during the rapid reactions that occur when water interacts with the environment - for example, when a waterfall falls onto a rock and spray is propelled into the air. It is conceivable that this event occurred when the Earth was a lifeless, volcanic, water-filled, and molten rock-filled world around four billion years ago when life first appeared.
What do the findings of the study mean?
Getty/ CNN | 75% of the human brain is water, and 75% of a living tree is water
This is the first proof that primordial molecules, simple amino acids, spontaneously produce peptides in pure water droplets, the building blocks of life. This water-based chemistry, which leads to proteins and life on Earth, might also accelerate the creation of medications to cure humanity’s most crippling ailments.
Scientists have speculated for decades that life on Earth originated in the seas. However, the chemistry remained a mystery. Raw amino acids, which meteorites regularly brought to the early Earth, may combine to generate peptides, the building blocks of proteins and life. Inexplicably, the procedure needs the loss of a water molecule, which is exceedingly improbable in a humid, aquatic, or marine environment. For life to develop, water was required. However, it also required land away from the river.
Getty Images/ UCL | Liquid water is a powerful hydrolytic agen
They also believe that “water isn’t wet,” where the peptide formation reaction occurs. This indicates that sites where liquid water meets the atmosphere, such as ocean spray droplets, might provide the optimal circumstances for these crucial chemical processes.
The Purdue team spent almost a decade using mass spectrometers to analyze chemical reactions in water-containing droplets. The speeds of chemical reactions in droplets are between one hundred and one million times quicker than in bulk solution. According to them, this finding might also expedite the creation of medications to cure humanity’s most devastating illnesses.
A study from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory
NASA/ IFLS | Water is the most important resource in the world
Researchers from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory discuss how electrical energy created naturally on the ocean floor may have contributed to the origin of life. Although scientists have previously offered this concept, titled “submarine alkaline hydrothermal origin of life,” the new paper synthesizes decades of field, laboratory, and theoretical studies into a comprehensive, coherent picture.
According to the results, which may also be referred to as the “water world” idea, life may have originated in warm, soft springs on the ocean floor long ago, when the Earth’s seas covered the whole globe and churned. This concept of hydrothermal vents as probable beginnings of life was initially offered in 1980 by other scientists who discovered them on the ocean floor near Cabo San Lucas, Mexico.
