Why is it that other labs seem to have all the best toys?
While I'm running my umpteenth agarose gel, following the umpteenth fiddly adjustment, these guys have been firing heavy weaponry.
As I've written before, it's no secret that amino acids (the basic lego-blocks of proteins) get built up in space (there's a long write up in the doorstopper Evolution: The First Four Billion Yearst), and end up coating asteroids and so on. This has lead some to suggest that the building blocks of life were manufactured in space and conveniently dropped onto Earth via meteors.
Of course, there's a slight problem. When a meteor impacts, it causes a large, hot bang. The question is if this would finish of the amino acids. That's what these researchers are trying to test. And how, may you ask, are they doing it? With one of these babies.
No, I'm not kidding. In Materials and Methods they list "A 20 mm powder propellant gun". They made a special shell that would be compressed, dumped the amino acids you'd find on meteors into it, and fired it at various speeds against a solid surface.
The results are fairly interesting:
1. Up to certain speeds, amino acids will survive quite well.
2. The result is that the amino acids remain quite dry
3. Impact has a tendency to switch the "handedness" of amino acids. So that means that amino acids in the mixture they're formed in should be more racemic than the ones that landed on earth.
To which I'll add my question:
1. They note that most meteorite impacts will be large enough to destroy the amino acids. But isn't it possible that the a.a. will be scattered into the atmosphere during insertion? I could see amino acids literally raining down there, especially in the transporting rock had just made the oceans boil.
(N.B.: On the off chance that the original researchers read this, I apologize in advance for the simplicity of the questions and presenting. I have very little time to call my own and I can only scavenge a little to read extra papers and write about them.)
No comments:
Post a Comment