Scientists reveal a cosmic factory for making the building blocks of life

Scientists have discovered a 'cosmic factory' for producing the building blocks of life, amino acids, in research published today in the journal Nature Geoscience.

The team from Imperial College London, the University of Kent and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory have discovered that when icy comets collide into a planet, amino acids can be produced.

These essential building blocks are also produced if a rocky meteorite crashes into a planet with an icy surface.

The researchers suggest that this process provides another piece to the puzzle of how life was kick-started on Earth, after a period of time between 4.5 and 3.8 billion years ago when the planet had been bombarded by comets and meteorites.

Dr Zita Martins, co-author of the paper from the Department of Earth Science and Engineering at Imperial College London, says:

"Our work shows that the basic building blocks of life can be assembled anywhere in the Solar System and perhaps beyond. However, the catch is that these building blocks need the right conditions in order for life to flourish. Excitingly, our study widens the scope for where these important ingredients may be formed in the Solar System and adds another piece to the puzzle of how life on our planet took root."

Dr Mark Price, co-author from the University of Kent, adds: "This process demonstrates a very simple mechanism whereby we can go from a mix of simple molecules, such as water and carbon-dioxide ice, to a more complicated molecule, such as an amino acid. This is the first step towards life. The next step is to work out how to go from an amino acid to even more complex molecules such as proteins."

The abundance of ice on the surfaces of Enceladus and Europa, which are moons orbiting Saturn and Jupiter respectively, could provide a perfect environment for the production of amino acids, when meteorites crash into their surface, say the researchers.

Their work further underlines the importance of future space missions to these moons to search for signs of life.

The researchers discovered that when a comet impacts on a world it creates a shock wave that generates molecules that make up amino acids.

The impact of the shock wave also generates heat, which then transforms these molecules into amino acids.

The team made their discovery by recreating the impact of a comet by firing projectiles through a large high speed gun.

This gun, located at the University of Kent, uses compressed gas to propel projectiles at speeds of 7.15 kilometres per second into targets of ice mixtures, which have a similar composition to comets.

The resulting impact created amino acids such as glycine and D-and L-alanine.

More information: Nature Geoscience, DOI: 10.1038/ngeo1930

Complex organic molecules on surface of Pluto

New evidence of complex organic molecules has been spotted in the surface of Pluto by the Hubble Space Telescope, a study has found.

Scientists at the Southwest Research Institute in Colorado, found that substances on the dwarf planet's surface are absorbing more ultraviolet light than expected.

These substances could be organic and made up of complex hydrocarbons or nitrogen-containing molecules.

Study leader Alan Stern believes the research could explain Pluto's colour. It is thought that the chemical species could be produced by the interaction of cosmic rays with surface ice.

"This is an exciting finding because complex Plutonian hydrocarbons and other molecules that could be responsible for the ultraviolet spectral features we found with Hubble may, among other things, be responsible for giving Pluto its ruddy colour," he said.

Probe New Horizons was launched in 2006 to make the first ever visit by space craft to the planet, which is one third of the size of Earth's moon. The probe will pass within 8,000 miles of the dwarf planet in July 2015.

Pluto was re-defined as a dwarf planet inl 2006, when the International Astronomical Union found that it failed to meet the third criteria to be classed as a planet - to have become gravitationally dominant within its orbit.

NASA Research Shows DNA Building Blocks in Space

NASA-funded researchers have found more evidence meteorites can carry DNA components created in space.

Scientists have detected the building blocks of DNA in meteorites since the 1960s, but were unsure whether they were created in space or resulted from contamination by terrestrial life.

The latest research indicates certain nucleobases, the building blocks of our genetic material, reach the Earth on meteorites in greater diversity and quantity than previously thought.

The discovery adds to a growing body of evidence that the chemistry inside asteroids and comets is capable of making building blocks of essential biological molecules.

Previously, scientists found amino acids in samples of comet Wild 2 from NASA’s Stardust mission and in various carbon-rich meteorites.

Amino acids are used to make proteins, the workhorse molecules of life. Proteins are used in everything from structures such as hair to enzymes, which are the catalysts that speed up or regulate chemical reactions.

The findings will be published in the online edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. In the new work, scientists analyzed samples of 12 carbon-rich meteorites, nine of which were recovered from Antarctica. The team found adenine and guanine, which are components of DNA nucleobases.

Also, in two of the meteorites, the team discovered for the first time trace amounts of three molecules related to nucleobases that almost never are used in biology. These nucleobase-related molecules, called nucleobase analogs, provide the first evidence that the compounds in the meteorites came from space and not terrestrial contamination.

“You would not expect to see these nucleobase analogs if contamination from terrestrial life was the source, because they’re not used in biology,” said Michael Callahan, astrobiologist and lead author of the paper from NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md.

“However, if asteroids are behaving like chemical ‘factories’ cranking out prebiotic material, you would expect them to produce many variants of nucleobases, not just the biological ones, because of the wide variety of ingredients and conditions in each asteroid.”

Additional evidence came from research to further rule out the possibility of terrestrial contamination as a source of these molecules. The team analyzed an eight-kilogram (17.6-pound) sample of ice from Antarctica, where most of the meteorites in the study were found.

The amounts of nucleobases found in the ice were much lower than in the meteorites. More significantly, none of the nucleobase analogs were detected in the ice sample. The team also analyzed a soil sample collected near one of the non-Antarctic meteorite’s fall site.

As with the ice sample, the soil sample had none of the nucleobase analogue molecules present in the meteorite.

Launched in Feb. 7, 1999, Stardust flew past an asteroid and traveled halfway to Jupiter to collect particle samples from the comet Wild 2. The spacecraft returned to Earth’s vicinity to drop off a sample-return capsule on January 15, 2006.

The research was funded by NASA’s Astrobiology Institute at the agency’s Ames Research Laboratory in Moffett Field Calif., and the Goddard Center for Astrobiology in Greenbelt, Md.; the NASA Astrobiology Exobiology and Evolutionary Biology Program and the NASA Postdoctoral Program at the agency’s Headquarters in Washington.

Additional information and images are available at: NASA DNA Study

Formaldehyde Could Have Set Stage For Life

Formaldehyde, a poison and a common molecule throughout the universe, is likely the source of the solar system's organic carbon solids - abundant in both comets and asteroids.

Scientists have long speculated about how the organic, or carbon-containing, material became a part of the solar system's fabric.

New research from Carnegie's George Cody, along with Conel Alexander and Larry Nittler, shows that these complex organic solids were likely made from formaldehyde in the primitive solar system. Their work is published online April 4 by the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

"We may owe our existence on this planet to interstellar formaldehyde," Cody said. "And what's ironic about it is that formaldehyde is poisonous to life on Earth."

During the early period of the inner solar system's formation, much of the organic carbon that wasn't trapped in primitive bodies was lost to space, along with much of the water. Prior to this study numerous competing ideas emerged to explain the existence of primitive organic solids.

Cody, of the Geophysical Laboratory, along with Alexander and Nittler, of the Department of Terrestrial Magnetism, and the team decided to study primitive solar system objects using advanced methods. What they discovered clearly pointed to a polymer formed from formaldehyde.

They tested their conclusion with experiments to reproduce the type of organic matter found in carbonaceous chondrites, a type of organic-rich meteorite, starting with formaldehyde.

They found that their formaldehyde-synthesised organic material was not only similar to that found in carbonaceous chondrites, but also similar to organic material found in a comet named 81P/Wild 2, pieces of which were collected in space by NASA's Stardust mission, as well as in interplanetary dust particles, or particles from space that likely originated from comets and asteroids.

Their results make sense, because formaldehyde is relatively abundant throughout the galaxy and the polymerization process would have been possible under conditions of the primitive solar system.

"Establishing the likely origin of the principal source of organic carbon in primitive solar system bodies is extremely satisfying," Cody said.

NASA Discover Arsenic based life form in salt lake

At their conference today, NASA scientist Felisa Wolfe Simon will announce that they have found a bacteria whose DNA is completely alien to what we know today. Instead of using phosphorus, the bacteria uses arsenic.

All life on Earth is made of six components: carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, oxygen, phosphorus and sulphur. Every being, from the smallest amoeba to the largest whale, share the same life stream. Our DNA blocks are all the same.

But not this one. This one is completely different. Discovered in the poisonous Mono Lake, California, this bacteria is made of arsenic, something that was thought to be completely impossible.

While she and other scientists theorized that this could be possible, this is the first discovery. The implications of this discovery are enormous to our understanding of life itself and the possibility of finding beings in other planets that don’t have to be like planet Earth.

No details have been disclosed about the origin or nature of this new life form. We will know more today at 2pm EST but, while this life hasn’t been found in another planet, this discovery does indeed change everything we know about biology.

NASA Martian sheen: Life on the rocks

WHEN NASA's Viking landers touched down on Mars, they were looking for signs of life. Instead, all their cameras showed was a dry, dusty - and entirely barren - landscape.

Or so it seemed. But what the 1976 Viking mission, and every subsequent one, saw was a scene littered with rocks coated with a dark, highly reflective sheen. That coating looks a lot like a substance known on Earth as "rock varnish", found in arid regions similar to those on Mars. The latest evidence hints that rock varnish is formed by bacteria. Could there be microbes on Mars making such material too?

Rock varnish has long been something of a mystery. It is typically just 1 to 2 micrometres thick, but can take a thousand years or more to grow, making it very hard to discover whether biological or purely chemical processes are responsible. If it is biological, though, the race will be on to discover whether the same thing has happened on Mars - and whether microbes still live there today.

If you go to Death Valley in California, you can find rock varnish covering entire desert pavements. Also known as desert varnish, it forms in many places around the globe, and despite its glacial growth rates, can cover vast areas.

The smooth, high sheen, dark brown-to-black coating is mainly made up of clay particles, which bind the iron and manganese oxides that give the coating its mirror-like reflectivity.

In the Khumbu region of Nepal, not far from Mount Everest, it has turned the boulders black. Halfway around the world, it enabled ancient peoples to create the Nazca Lines in the Peruvian desert.

These giant, elaborate images - some over 200 metres across and created over 1000 years ago - were made by simply removing rows of varnished stones to exposing the lighter stones or soil beneath.

George Merrill coined the phrase desert varnish in 1898, while working for the US Geological Survey (USGS). No one really studied it, though, until 1954, when Charles Hunt showed that the veneer forms on many different rock types - meaning that it wasn't simply a chemical production from a certain kind of rock and prompting the first questions about where it might come from (Science, vol 120, p 183). Hunt went on to find rock varnish in humid regions, tropical rainforests and at high altitudes in the Alps and the Rocky mountains.

Theories on how rock varnish forms weren't long in coming - and, initially at least, biology didn't get a look-in. In 1958 Celeste Engel of the USGS and Robert Sharp from the California Institute of Technology explained it as a chemical weathering phenomenon similar to iron oxide stains - red/orange coatings arising when iron particles from the air collect on the surface of rocks and bind together when made wet by dew (Geological Society of America Bulletin, vol 69, p 487).

Read the full article here ....

Synthetics and Biology: Is it a working Partnership?

"Plastics" may have been the Baby Boomer watchword, but "synthetic" rules today.

That's "synthetic" as in synthetic biology, the hottest biomedical buzzword, promising new drugs, new fuel and someday, new life.

"If we can make life, then we understand it," says molecular biologist Steven Benner of the Foundation for Applied Molecular Evolution in Gainesville, Fla.

Starting with the building blocks of animal and plant cells, synthetic biologists are reengineering living things today and hope to create synthetic life tomorrow. The ultimate goal, Benner says, is "synthesizing life from scratch."

That makes experts, including human genome pioneers Craig Venter of Rockville, Md., and Jay Keasling of the University of California-Berkeley, hopeful and cautious at the same time about the promise and peril of the field.

In July, a team led by Carole Lartigue of the J. Craig Venter Institute in Rockville, Md., reported the field's latest advance in the journal Science: a way to genetically engineer bacteria, previously considered impossible. "Nobody else has done anything remotely like this before," Venter says.

The immediate application is engineering defanged vaccine strains for use against the bacteria family chosen for the study. But a lot of other ideas are cooking, from saving the planet from global warming to figuring out just how life started in the first place.

The promise

In 1974, oncologist Wac{lstrok}aw Szybalski of the University of Wisconsin Medical School in Madison coined the term "synthetic biology" as a way to describe biologists shuffling genes among organisms. The term has taken on multiple meanings since then in science, says David Rejeski of the Synthetic Biology Project at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington, D.C. The public largely has no clue, he says: "Nobody really knows what it is."

One popular definition championed by MIT's Drew Endy, who founded the non-profit Biobrick Foundation, is an engineering one, in which the parts of cells act as the screws, bolts, bricks and mortar of future biology. Others, such as Venter and Harvard's George Church, talk of building completely man-made cells, with parts all made from scratch.

Some recent innovations:

• Last year, Keasling's lab unveiled bacteria that make the anti-malaria drug artemisinin by transferring 14 genes into a microbe.

• Benner's lab has created an artificial form of DNA that uses six chemicals for the "bases" of a genetic code, unlike the four found in human DNA.

• In March, Church announced the creation of artificial "ribosomes," cellular factories that take messenger genes and make proteins that keep cells alive.

"Over the next 25 years, synthetic biologically engineered antibiotics could be developed which monitor the adaptation of the bacteria they are designed to kill, and modify their response accordingly," says Richard Kitney of the United Kingdom's Imperial College. "Similarly, synthetically engineered T-cell (immune cell) components could be used to develop a device which is capable of finding and killing cancerous cells."