Life on Earth may have started thanks to a chemical Big Bang in sea spray, scientists believe.
They made a “dramatic discovery” that the building blocks for all living things arise spontaneously when water droplets meet air.
“This is essentially the chemistry behind the origin of life,” said the researchers from Purdue University in Indiana.
Most scientists agree that the chemicals necessary for life were brought to Earth on asteroids and comets, which also deposited water.
But they have long been puzzled as to how these simple molecules and amino acids could be brought to life.
Life on Earth may have started thanks to a chemical Big Bang in sea spray, scientists believe
PANSPERMIA: HOW LIFE COMES FROM THE STARS TO EARTH
Panspermia is a theory that suggests that life is hitchhiking to spread across the known physical universe via comets or meteorites.
Extremophiles capable of surviving the inhospitable conditions of space could become trapped in debris flung into space after collisions between asteroids and life-hosting planets.
These dormant life forms can then travel for long periods of time before randomly colliding with other planets.
One argument supporting the panspermia theory is the emergence of life shortly after Earth’s heavy bombardment period between 4 and 3.8 billion years ago.
The earliest evidence of life on Earth suggests that it existed around 3.83 billion years ago, coinciding with this bombardment phase.
The ingredients were thought to slowly come together bit by bit, but this new theory says life happened all at once in a chemical big bang.
Lead author Professor Graham Cooks of Purdue University in Indiana said: “This is essentially the chemistry behind the origin of life.
“This is the first evidence that primordial molecules, simple amino acids, spontaneously form peptides, the building blocks of life, in droplets of pure water.
“This is a dramatic discovery.”
According to the US team, the finding could even hold the key to better medicines for humanity’s most vulnerable diseases.
Professor Cooks added: ‘Reaction rates in droplets are hundreds to millions of times faster than the same chemicals reacting in a large solution.’
Their acceleration makes catalytic converters superfluous. Understanding how this process works is the “holy grail” of chemistry, according to experts.
It sheds light on why life arose and informs the search for it on other planets or even moons.
For decades scientists theorized it started in the oceans, but the chemistry remained a mystery.
When the earth was formed 4.5 billion years ago, it was a sterile ball of rock – struck by meteorites and covered with erupting volcanoes.
But within a billion years it was colonized by microorganisms and today life covers every inch of the planet, from the highest mountains to the deepest seas.
For more than a century, the world’s brightest minds have been debating what happened for barren rock, sand and chemicals to give rise to life.
Crude amino acids – something supplied by meteorites every day – can react and combine to form peptides.
But mysteriously, the building blocks of proteins – and life – also require the loss of a water molecule.
This is highly unlikely in a humid or oceanic environment.
It means that it needed water for life to arise, but also space away from water.
Professor Cooks, an expert on early Earth chemistry, spent more than 10 years using mass spectrometer scanners to analyze chemical reactions in droplets containing water.
“Water isn’t wet everywhere,” he said.
Most scientists agree that the chemicals necessary for life were brought to Earth on asteroids and comets, which also deposited water (stock image)
At the edges, where a drop meets the atmosphere, incredibly fast reactions can take place, transforming abiotic amino acids into the building blocks of life.
Places where spray erupts and waves smash the land, or where fresh water gushes down a cliff, were fertile landscapes for the potential development of life.
Understanding how amino acids assemble into proteins and eventually life forms could revolutionize chemical synthesis.
Faster reactions are critical to the discovery and development of new drugs and therapeutic treatments for life-threatening diseases.
Professor Cooks added: “If you walk through an academic campus at night, the buildings with the lights on are where synthetic chemists work.
“Their experiments are so slow that they run for days or weeks at a time. This is not necessary.
“Using droplet chemistry, we built a device that is now being used at Purdue to accelerate the synthesis of novel chemicals and potential new drugs.”
The study was published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
LIFE ON EARTH MAY HAVE BEGUN THANKS TO A MODIFIED VERSION OF MODERN RNA
Life on Earth may have originated thanks to a modified version of modern DNA’s sister molecule, scientists believe.
DNA is the backbone of life and almost our entire planet depends on it, but on Primordial Earth a primitive version of its lesser known sister – RNA – was the focal point of evolution, experts say.
RNA is structurally similar to DNA except that uracil is replaced with one of the four basic parts, thymine.
This changes the shape and structure of the molecule, and researchers have long believed that this chemical was crucial in the evolution of Earth’s first life forms.
A chance discovery by Harvard academics, published in December 2018, found that a slightly different version of RNA may have been the key ingredient that allowed life to flourish on Earth.
Scientists claim that instead of guanine, a chemical called inosine may have been present, which allowed life to evolve.
This subtle change in bases known as nucleotides could provide the first known evidence for the “RNA World Hypothesis” — a theory claiming that RNA was an integral part of primitive life forms, they say.