Scientists say that almost close to solving the mystery of the origin of life on our planet.
Evolutionary scientists made a major breakthrough in uncovering the mystery of the origin of life – the first time they were able to collect molecules, resembling the bases of RNA and DNA, from the primitive “building blocks of life”.
“Early Earth can be represented in the form of very sloppy laboratory, which produced many different molecules needed for the origin of life. Some of them survived and began to flourish, and others eventually died out. This also applies to those molecules that gave birth to RNA,” said Nicholas HUD (Hud Nicholas) from Georgia Institute of Technology (USA).
In the 50-ies of the last century, American chemists Stanley Miller and Harold Urey repeated the first stages of the biochemical evolution of life by creating a set of amino acids and other “building blocks of life” in a solution of water and simple inorganic substances. This allowed the scientists to seriously talk about abiogenesis – the origin of life as a result of the processes in inanimate nature.
These experiments were repeated recently, however, beyond the synthesis of amino acids and prototypes of fats, scientists have not progressed – there were problems both with the appearance of the sugary substances that make DNA and RNA, and the Assembly themselves “carriers” of genetic information. Only recently chemists learned how to dextrose and other sugars, and not tar using the “Martian” chemicals, and there remains only the last stage – Assembly of RNA and DNA.
HUD and his colleagues say they managed to implement this stage of the evolution of life from inanimate nature, experimenting with different substances, which appear in the test tubes during experiments, repeating the experiments of Miller-Urey.
Using only two simple organic molecules – barbituric acid and aromatic hydrocarbon melamine, the authors were able to create a set of nitrogenous bases, very similar to adenine, guanine, cytosine and uracil – the “building blocks” of DNA and RNA. Scientists have named them the C-MMP and the BMP.
According to the researchers, these “proto-letters” DNA was associated with ribose and other sugars and had even formed pairs of two opposite to each other on value grounds, as it happens in real double chains of DNA and RNA. As scholars have noted, the similarity of their with these the nitrogenous bases in DNA and RNA is so great that, in principle, they can claim the role of their chemical parents.
