October
06
/ 2022
A team of chemists from Purdue University in West Lafayette, Indiana have discovered a mechanism that could explain how the fundamental ingredients of living cells were first created in the unimaginably distant past. The scientists say this mechanism can produce peptides, the so-called “building blocks” of primordial life, from inorganic matter in ocean environments, where the first living microorganisms appeared approximately 3.7 billion years ago. All the plant and animal life currently existing on the planet can be traced back to these incredibly distant beginnings, to the very first stirrings in the primordial soup. But significant questions remain about how exactly life formed from nothing, or more specifically from the mixture of non-living compounds that would have been found in
