Hidden in the deep sea, the wizard of nature - the factor that turns chaotic precursors into building blocks of life on Earth still exists ...
Hidden in the deep sea, the wizard of nature - the factor that turns chaotic precursors into building blocks of life on Earth still exists today.
Biophysicist Dieter Braun from Ludwig – Maximilians University (Germany) and colleagues have identified what is key. It makes the organic materials on earth not exist as discrete pristine as other planets. It can combine to create life: bubbles in the deep sea.
At the lab, they created models called heat gradients. It contains a solution that is heated on one end and cooled on the other. This helps the precursor molecules undergo intense temperature changes when moving between hot and cold ends. "It's like a micro ocean," Braun said.
Hot bubbles from the earth enter the cold water in the depths of the ocean. It could be what helps discrete precursor molecules transform into building blocks of life - (Image: LIVE SCIENCE)
Under the ocean, hot volcanoes have spurred smoke to rise, releasing hot air bubbles, the opposite of the environment near the ocean floor - extremely cold deep water.
The rapid and extremely uncomfortable temperature change when exposed almost simultaneously to something very cold and something very hot stimulated the precursor molecules to change. For example, sugar molecules become crystals; a skeleton formed by nucleotides of RNA and DNA.
The acids form longer chains, the initial step of RNA. Finally, the molecules arrange themselves into simple cell structures.
According to Braun, without these bubbles, the precursor molecules would be diffused in the environment. Thermal bubbles are like a catalyst, a key to activate the life-generating reaction chain.
This may further support the hypothesis that planets have hydrothermal systems. For example, Earth or the moon Enceladus of Saturn, life can be born right where hydrothermal vents gush out a series of gas bubbles.
A total of 6 models representing 6 different stages of primitive life were created to prove this theory.
"Braun's model is an accurate representation of the original environment. Braun and her colleagues nurtured their experiments with many complex molecules necessary for life." Chemist Ramanarayanan Krishnamurthy from Scripps Institution of Oceanography (USA), who did not participate in the study, commented to Live Science.
However, he did not exclude the possibility that the ancient oceans did not have the right conditions for the aforementioned molecular forms mentioned above, and life was born in a different way.
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