What is it about?
Life is more likely to form in environments that contain its building blocks such as amino acids. Here, we demonstrate for the first time that nitrate, NO3-, can react with common hydrothermal minerals and simple organics to form amino acids in plausible environmental conditions for early Earth. Prior to this work, making amino acids required an environmental source of ammonia, NH3, which forms in reducing atmospheres--those with high amounts of hydrogen-bearing compounds like CH4 and low amounts of oxygen-bearing ones like CO2. This work expands the conditions in which amino acids, and therefore life, could form to include those with oxidizing atmosphere, which have high amounts of oxygen-bearing compounds.
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Why is it important?
We expand the environments in which life might form to include those with oxidizing atmospheres. This includes some theories for the atmospheric composition of early Earth and Mars.
Perspectives
This work allowed me to explore chemistry using a simple suite of environmentally abundant reactants-- glyoxylate, nitrate, and ferroan brucite. We produced not only a simple, bio-relevant product, glycine, but also a suite of other amino acids. I hope that others enjoy unravelling this chemistry as much as we did.
Laura Chimiak
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Glycine synthesis from nitrate and glyoxylate mediated by ferroan brucite: An integrated pathway for prebiotic amine synthesis, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, October 2024, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences,
DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2408248121.
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