Meteorite Bombardment On Ancient Earth May Have Brought Major Building Blocks Of Life

Eddie Gonzales Jr. – MessageToEagle.com – Researchers found sugars essential to life in meteorites, and confirmed that these compounds are supporting the hypothesis that chemical reactions in asteroids – the parent bodies of many meteorites – can make some ingredients for life as we know it.

Artist’s concept of meteors impacting ancient Earth. Some scientists think such impacts may have delivered water and other molecules useful to emerging life on Earth. Credits: NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center Conceptual Image Lab

The discovery of ribose and other bio-essential sugars including arabinose and xylose in two different meteorites that are rich in carbon, NWA 801 (type CR2) and Murchison (type CM2) may support the hypothesis that life, as we know, may have its beginnings in space rocks that bombarded ancient planet Earth.

Ribose is a crucial component of RNA (ribonucleic acid). In much of modern life, RNA serves as a messenger molecule, copying genetic instructions from the DNA molecule (deoxyribonucleic acid) and delivering them to molecular factories within the cell called ribosomes that read the RNA to build specific proteins needed to carry out life processes.

“Other important building blocks of life have been found in meteorites previously, including amino acids (components of proteins) and nucleobases (components of DNA and RNA), but sugars have been a missing piece among the major building blocks of life,” Yoshihiro Furukawa of Tohoku University, Japan, lead author of the study, said in a press release.

“The research provides the first direct evidence of ribose in space and the delivery of the sugar to Earth. The extraterrestrial sugar might have contributed to the formation of RNA on the prebiotic Earth which possibly led to the origin of life.”

Jason Dworkin, a co-author of the study at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, said that “it is remarkable that a molecule as fragile as ribose could be detected in such ancient material. These results will help guide our analyses of pristine samples from primitive asteroids Ryugu and Bennu, to be returned by the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency’s Hayabusa2 and NASA’s OSIRIS-REx spacecraft.”

DNA is the template for life, carrying the instructions for how to build and operate a living organism. However, RNA also carries information, and many researchers think it evolved first and was later replaced by DNA.

“The sugar in DNA (2-deoxyribose) was not detected in any of the meteorites analyzed in this study,” said Danny Glavin, a co-author of the study at NASA Goddard.

“This is important since there could have been a delivery bias of extraterrestrial ribose to the early Earth which is consistent with the hypothesis that RNA evolved first.”

Written by Eddie Gonzales Jr. – MessageToEagle.com Staff