“This is the first demonstration that primordial molecules, simple amino acids, spontaneously form peptides, the building blocks of life, in droplets of pure water.Graham Cooks, a professor of analytical chemistry at the Purdue College of Science, was quoted as saying in a university statement.
According to the chemist this is The study, published in the scientific journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, revealed “essentially the chemistry behind the origin of life,” something that has intrigued scientists for decades.
According to US university research, water-based chemistry “may also accelerate the development of drugs to treat humanity’s most debilitating diseases.”
According to the study, amino acids can react and aggregate to form peptides, the “building blocks of proteins and ultimately of life.”
“Intriguingly, the process requires the loss of a water molecule, which seems highly unlikely in a moist, aqueous or oceanic environment. In order for life to form, it needed water, but it also needed space away from water,” the conclusions say. of the study.
Research by the team of Graham Cooks, an expert in mass spectrometry and earth chemistry, has answered this conundrum, because “water is not wet everywhere”.
“On the coasts, where a drop of water meets the atmosphere, incredibly fast reactions can occur, turning abiotic amino acids into the building blocks of life. Also places where sea spray flies into the air and waves crash on land, or where fresh water from a slope, were fertile landscapes for the possible evolution of life,” the study says.
The chemists involved in this research have spent more than 10 years studying chemical reactions in water droplets using mass spectrometers.
By understanding how amino acids formed into proteins and eventually into life forms, we could revolutionize scientists’ understanding of chemical synthesis, a process that “can now help synthetic chemists accelerate reactions critical to the discovery and development of new drugs and treatments for diseases”, helped the American institution move forward.
Source: DN
