The words “short” and “rare” really are a matter of context. Female PhD astronomers (hi, Pamela), they’re rare but we see them. Humans, we’re short-lived, but we see them. When it comes to the shortest lived and rarest events, I have to say the moment that a bunch molecules become a living cell may be one of the rarest and shortest lived things we really wish we understood. 

While I doubt we’ll ever catch life naturally coming into existence, we’d like to figure out how to force this to happen in a lab, and doing this lab experiment requires researchers to understand where the stuff of life actually came from. In new research, published in Science Advances and led by Yoshihiro Furukawa, researchers announce that the organic chemistry necessary to create the amino acids that build life could have used widely available materials found in the early solar system. This work required the team to study the compositions of meteorites that contained essentially locked samples of the building blocks of planets. This allowed them to see what kinds of reactions took place, and hint at what reactions – formose-type reactions if you want to know – might have led to us.

More Information

EurekAlert release

“Synthesis of 13C-enriched amino acids with 13C-depleted insoluble organic matter in a formose-type reaction in the early solar system,” Yoshihiro Furukawa, Yoshinari Iwasa, and Yoshito Chikaraishi, 2021 April 28, Science Advances