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May 14, 2009 05:15 PM | 13
This week's issue of Nature features a welcome discovery for those of us enthralled, mystified and frustrated by the study of the origins of life.
John Sutherland, a chemist at the University of Manchester, and his colleagues claim to have figured out how ribose, phosphate and the nitrogenous (nitrogen-bearing) molecules known as nucleobases first came together to form nucleotides—the building blocks of the RNA world from which life is thought to have emerged.
"My assumption is that we are here on this planet as a fundamental consequence of organic chemistry," Sutherland told The New York Times. His secret was running the experiment in stages, only adding phosphate in the final step. So far, the team has succeeded in building two of the four nucleotides; the molecule pictured [left] is cytosine, the nucleobase that, until now, scientists were unable to combine with sugars and phosphates to form the RNA nucleotide ribocytidine phosphate.*
Is the latest discovery a real breakthrough or just another high-profile paper to tease the navel-gazers of the science world? Jack Szostak of the Massachusetts General Hospital wrote in a commentary that the new discovery "will stand for years as one of the great advances in prebiotic chemistry."
The findings also serve as a reminder that the pace of scientific discovery does not always move as quickly as scientists would like. In 1871 Darwin first postulated that life began in a "warm little pond, with all sorts of ammonia and phosphoric salts."
Almost a century later, Stanley Miller conducted the great-grandaddy of origin-of-life studies at the University of Chicago with his colleague Harold Urey, experiments which left scientists with more questions than they answered.
In 1994 Leslie Orgel wrote in the pages of Scientific American that growing evidence was supporting the theory that life emerged from RNA, but he despaired, "how that RNA came into being remains unknown." Last year, scientists got perhaps a little bit too giddy when some minor results were published in Science based on forgotten vials from the original Miller–Urey studies.
Chemist Robert Shapiro of New York University, who wrote about his alternative theory on the origin of life for Scientific American in 2007, told Chemistry World that Sutherland's results "have nothing to do with the origin of life on Earth whatsoever."
*Correction (5/15/09): This sentence was changed after posting. It originally incorrectly identified cytosine as a nucleotide.
Cytosine image via Wikimedia Commons
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13 Comments
Add Commentlet's just hope that all of this ties together to create a clearer picture. the first evidence of self replication is exactly that. it may not be the direct organic chem link. it may have begun as an inorganic reaction (meaning no carbon), but was later supplanted when carbon or the like became the ideal suitor. or perhaps a catalyst is being missed, one that is all around us to this day, but has yet to be included. the context of 4 billion years ago has been erased, correct? either way, let's also remember the number of iterations that can occur in just a 1000 years let alone millions upon millions...
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThat is a completely useless exorcise. They cannot "build" the RNA or that implies an outside force. By adding phosphate at predetermined points, they are creating, their words "building" the nucleotides. To be true to science they must stand aloof and let the chemicals merge randomly otherwise they are just proving that it could not be done without some sort of deistic involvement.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisWaltR - Recreating the conditions that allow life to emerge on its own is NOT the same as creating life itself.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThat's not the "nucleotide" cytosine, it's the base. The nucleotide (cytidine mono- di- or tri-phosphate) would contain a sugar (ribose) part and would be phosphorylated.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this"or perhaps a catalyst is being missed, ONE THAT IS ALL AROUND US TO THIS DAY BUT HAS YET TO BE INCLUDED"
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisYou guys are hilarious, you can't even explain your weird theories without using the work "create". By the way, where did all the strange chemicals come from, just curious.
Seems to me that it is too early to get excited and/or annoyed about this. Seems like some folks have chips on their shoulders.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisSome chemicals form naturally, like water, methane, various oxides and phosphates, plus hundreds of organic compounds (by the way, organic in chemistry doesn't mean 'living', it means 'based on carbon').
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisAlso, please tell me you are not serious about judging their work based on the limitations of language. Now you're just picking at straws.
This is my favorite twist of logic.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisIn discovering that 1+2=3, I did not actually create the universe and its laws of proportion, therefore, until I do, I have proven that... a god or gods did everything.
You're reaching. Very, verrrry far. Try to "exorcise" your mind. Or hang out on a science website and insist that your preferred unprovable mythology is the correct one. Whatever.
As opposed to the humanism mythology that is equally unprovable? Genetic mutations/ variations can be either positive, neutral, or detrimental. For Macro evolution and the basis for humanism to be true, we should see observable evidence of the positive in abundance. We d we dont see ANY. In fact we barely have seen any neutral. Almost all genetic dirivitives from the base are detrimental which follows the laws of thermodynamics. Macro Evolution flies in the face of that. The fact that humanists keep throwing up studies like this and Stanley Miller where conditions are tightly controlled and do nothing to resemble "early earth" show how little true science is involved in your science website's mythology of discovering how life began. Whatever indeed
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThe science is intersting as always. The conclusions the scientists make in an attempt to be armchair philosophers is amusing as always. Do what you do best , develope hypothesis and attempt to prove or disprove them. Any conclusions you make as to the origins of life....space...stars..the entire universe are folly. The religous veiwpoint carries as much weight as the scientific, the ONLY idea that is more ridiculous than the idea of a god who cares for humanity is the idea that the universe came from nothing. With this in mind you should understand that the atheistic explanation for how the universe came to be is seemingly more ludicrous than the theist version. Why not drop the bashing back and forth and accept the science for what it is without the short sighted philosophical assumptions. In the end science will never be able to say how everything came from nothing. Some have their faith and others have their doubts, no one has the answers. Deal with it and when we die we can see who is right or maybe we wont see anything at all.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisIt is most unlikely that mineral crystal assemblages will form, yet in suitable underground ranges of chemistry temperature and pressure they do, and the variety is mind-boggling. So perhaps biochemists have not found the right mix of conditions and catalysts yet to get the ACGT blocks to form. In view of the possible number of permutations of conditions, this is hardly surprising....
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisOnly an article on the origins of life can result in so much idiotic nonsense!!
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisDoes anyone have a spell-check anymore???
PeterT
The initial SA blog intry is very poor. Borrell wrote, "His (Sutherland) secret was running the experiment in stages, only adding phosphate in the final step." From the Nature abstract: "Here we show that activated pyrimidine ribonucleotides can be formed in a short sequence that bypasses free ribose and the nucleobases, and instead proceeds through arabinose amino-oxazoline and anhydronucleoside intermediates. The starting materials for the synthesiscyanamide, cyanoacetylene, glycolaldehyde, glyceraldehyde and inorganic phosphateare plausible prebiotic feedstock molecules12, 13, 14, 15, and the conditions of the synthesis are consistent with potential early-Earth geochemical models. Although inorganic phosphate is only incorporated into the nucleotides at a late stage of the sequence, its presence from the start is essential as it controls three reactions in the earlier stages by acting as a general acid/base catalyst, a nucleophilic catalyst, a pH buffer and a chemical buffer."
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisIN short, the key message of the reaction was to have all the basic components together in a geochemically reasonable fashion throught the entire process, rather then introducing them in a reaction sequence imagined a priori by a chemist. This compares well with the last publication of Stanley Miller and colleagues who found that the addition of calcite, or borate facilitated abiotic amino acid production, even in the presence of trace oxygen. The role of minerals in the origin of life has been a constant background to OOL research since the 1950s, but had been largely ignored by purely organic chemists.