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“It’s alive! It’s alive! ”
In the 1931 film “Frankenstein”, Dr. Henry Frankenstein Hurlant, his triumph was an electrifying moment in more ways than one. While massive bolts of lightning and energy crackled, the Frankenstein monster stirred on a laboratory table, his corpse brought life by the power of electricity.
Electric energy may also have triggered the beginnings of life on Earth billions of years ago, but with a little less landscape wick than this classic film scene.
The land is around 4.5 billion years and the oldest direct fossil proof of ancient life – stromatolitisor microscopic organisms kept in layers called microbial carpets – concerns 3.5 billion years. However, some scientists suspect that life is from even earlieremerging from organic molecules accumulated in primitive water bodies, a mixture sometimes called primordial soup.
But where does this organic matter come from in the first place? Researchers decades ago proposed that lightning has caused chemical reactions in the ancient earth oceans and spontaneously produced organic molecules.
Now new research published on March 14 in the journal Scientific advances suggests that barely visible “micro-leghtning” spanks generated between droplets loaded with water mist, could have been powerful enough to cook amino acids from inorganic material. Amino acids – organic molecules that combine to form proteins – are the most fundamental constituent elements of life and have been the first step towards the evolution of life.
“It is recognized that an energetic catalyst was almost certainly necessary to facilitate some of the reactions on early land which led to the origin of life,” said the astrobiologist and geobiologist Dr Amy J. WilliamsAssociate professor in the Geosciences department of the University of Florida. In order for animo acids to form, they need nitrogen atoms that can bind to carbon. According to Williams, who was not involved in research.
“Lightning, or in this case, Microlightning, has energy to break molecular links and therefore facilitate the generation of new molecules which are essential at the origin of life on earth,” said Williams in CNN in an email.
Mist and micro-walking
To recreate a scenario that can have produced the first organic molecules of the earth, the researchers built experiences of 1953 when the American chemists Stanley Miller and Harold Urey have concocted a mixture of gas imitating the atmosphere of the ancient earth. Miller and Urey Ammonia (NH3), methane (CH4), hydrogen (H2) and waterJoined their “atmosphere” inside a glass sphere and rocked it with electricity, producing simple amino acids containing carbon and nitrogen. THE Miller-ear experienceAs it is now called, supporting the scientific theory of abiogenesis: that life could emerge from non -living molecules.
For the new study, scientists revised the 1953 experiences but drew their attention to the smaller scale electrical activity, the author of the main study said Dr Richard ZareMarguerite Blake Wilbur Professor of Natural Sciences and professor of chemistry at the University of Stanford in California. Zare and his colleagues examined the electricity exchange between the loaded water droplets measuring between 1 micron and 20 microns in diameter. (The width of a human hair is 100 microns.)
“Large droplets are loaded positively. The small droplets are negatively loaded,” Zare told CNN. “When droplets that have opposite loads are close to each other, the electrons can go from the drop -off charged with the drip loaded positively.”
The researchers mixed ammonia, carbon dioxide, methane and nitrogen in a glass bulb, then sprayed the gases with water mist, using a high -speed camera to capture low lightning lights in steam. When they examined the contents of the bulb, they found organic molecules with carbon nitrogen links. These included glycine and uracil of amino acid, a nucleotide base in RNA.
“We did not discover any new chemistry; we really reproduced all the chemistry that Miller and Urey made in 1953,” said Zare. The team also did not discover the new physics, he added-the experiences were based on known principles of electrostatic.
“What we to have Made, for the first time, we saw that the small droplets, when they are formed from the water, actually emit the light and obtain this spark, “said Zare.” It’s new. And this spark causes all types of chemical transformations. »»
Water and life
Lightning is a spectacular exposure of electric power, but it is also sporadic and unpredictable. Even on a volatile land billions of years ago, lightning may have been too infrequent to produce amino acids in sufficient quantities for life – a fact that has cast a doubt about such theories in the past, Zare said.
However, water spraying would have been more common than lightning. A more likely scenario is that the microlitery generated by the mist has constantly zaps amino acids in existence from swimming pools and puddles, where molecules could accumulate and form more complex molecules, which has finally led to the evolution of life.
“The micro-charges between the obviously loaded water microdroplets make all the organic molecules observed above in the Miller-Eruy experience,” said Zare. “We propose that this is a new mechanism for the prebiotic synthesis of molecules which constitute the constituent elements of life.”
However, even with new discoveries on microlightning, questions remain on the origins of life, he added. While some scientists support the concept of electric electric debut Hydrothermal vents On the seabed, produced by a combination of seawater, fluids rich in hydrogen and extreme pressure.
Yet another hypothesis suggests that organic molecules are not due to all on earth. They rather trained in space and were transported here by comets or fragments of asteroidsA process known as Panspermia.
“We still don’t know the answer to this question,” said Zare. “But I think we are closer to understanding something more about this could arrived. “”
Although the details of the origins of life on Earth are never fully explained, “this study provides another avenue for the formation of crucial molecules at the origin of life,” said Williams. “Water is an omnipresent aspect of our world, giving birth to the” blue marble “of the nickname to describe the land of space. Perhaps the fall of water, the most crucial element that supports us, also played a greater role in the origin of life on earth than we recognize it before. ”
Mindy Weisberger is a scientific writer and media producer whose work has appeared in Live Science, Scientific American and How It Works Magazine.