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Lab-made primordial soup yields RNA bases

nature.com

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Re: Lab-made primordial soup yields RNA bases

#81

Post by Gatsky »

ecoled_ame wrote: post #62
Gatsky wrote: post #57

These abiogenesis experiments are a little strange... they aim to show that something could have happened. Whether that is what actually happened is considered less relevant and in fact can probably never be determined. Does anyone really believe that it is impossible to get spontaneous nucleotide generation under certain conditions (the conditions also being speculative)? The really interesting thing would be findin…

Meteorites contain nitrogenous bases https://www.pnas.org/content/108/34/13995

Fascinating thanks, sorry I should have searched it up.

Re: Lab-made primordial soup yields RNA bases

#82

Post by david-gpu »

joyjoyjoy wrote: post #65

I came across an article about DNA but did not had time to read it and lost it. It was about some ideas why DNA has 4 bases (and not 6 or 8). They also mention why 20 (?) amino acids. It was something similar to degrees of freedom. Not sure where I saw it. hackernews? Might have been Scientific American. I anyone remembers I would appreciate a link.

Was it an article about how there are 64 possible encodings of 3 bases (codons), but some of them are synonymous and only 20 unique amino acids are synthetized? And how this redundant encoding appears to be unusually resistant to mutations, as replacing one base with another would often encode a chemically similar amino acid? I remember reading something like that, but I couldn't find it either.

Re: Lab-made primordial soup yields RNA bases

#83

Post by microcolonel »

I was just having a conversation about the probabilistic craziness of abiogenesis this morning with a young christian who was out proselytizing, this is a step toward the real deal (though I think the title goes further than the research here).

Glad to see chemists are still trying to answer this beautiful, burning question. To those in this thread wondering: yes, there are people so flabbergasted by abiogenesis that they turn to alternative answers.

Re: Lab-made primordial soup yields RNA bases

#84

Post by memling »

outworlder wrote: post #74
andy_ppp wrote: post #58

I sometimes find the chances of us being here so remote, it can't really be just survival of the fittest can it? There must be other means for evolution to be more intelligently selective. I'm arguing that you'd see some kind of evolved "invisible" hand rather than an actual maker behind all of this.

No invisible hand is required. Any life form that has reached the cognitive capability to reason about itself will be amazed by the sheer "coincidence" of their habitat. "wow, isn't it amazing that our planet's atmosphere is composed of the very ammonia we need to survive in?" No invisible hand required. Also evolution is "intelligently selective". Surviving and reproducing is a pretty intelligent mechanism. It will…

> Any life form that has reached the cognitive capability to reason about itself will be amazed by the sheer "coincidence" of their habitat. "wow, isn't it amazing that our planet's atmosphere is composed of the very ammonia we need to survive in?"

Isn't this a non sequitur? Whether any life form would wonder about its existence (probable or otherwise) has no bearing whatever on whether it evolved or was designed or specially created.

Re: Lab-made primordial soup yields RNA bases

#85

Post by Roritharr »

A while ago I read somewhere that the odds of life creating itself via basic chemical pathways are so miniscule, that there must be quite a few instances of mechanical clocks creating itself by rocks beating together over the aeons in the universe before the first dna based organism appeared.

Might be very wrong but still a beautiful picture.

Re: Lab-made primordial soup yields RNA bases

#87

Post by unexaminedlife »

outworlder wrote: post #72
naniwaduni wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> almost all of the base elements from the periodic table that we are composed of are lighter than air This is almost completely gibberish since you don't find atoms in isolation.

> This is almost completely gibberish since you don't find atoms in isolation. No you don't. You find them in molecules. Nowadays it is a bit tough to find the pure gases in our planet, but they are readily available in high quantities in our universe. In gaseous form, even.

Very interesting. That's probably another assumption that may be worth attention. Is it necessary that DNA / RNA molecules were originally formed on earth?

This may not be directly relevant to this idea, but first thing that came to mind when I read your comment was this:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panspermia

Re: Lab-made primordial soup yields RNA bases

#88

Post by roland00 »

How is this different from the Miller-Urey experiments from the 1950s ? I am asking this for someone who is more knowledgeable and technical than me.

"To my understanding" ? Those 1952 experiments yielded 20 amino acids, and this experiment in 2016 to 2019 experiments merely are demonstrating RNA can be made with a similar experiment? Our cells naturally use RNA, specifically mRNA in a "translation" process at the Ribosomes part of our cells where the Amino Acids are used to create longer protein chains.

Am I remembering my AP Biology correctly or did I get something wrong?

Re: Lab-made primordial soup yields RNA bases

#89

Post by unexaminedlife »

naniwaduni wrote: post #69
unexaminedlife wrote: post #59

Has anyone proven that the "soup" has to be liquid? I'm no chemist, but I was curious one day so I looked through the chemical composition of humans, and was surprised to see that almost all of the base elements from the periodic table that we are composed of are lighter than air. Just ran the numbers again for this post: ~96.2% oxygen,hydrogen,nitrogen,carbon ~ 3.8% calcium,phosphorus, potassium,sulfur,sodium, chlor…

> almost all of the base elements from the periodic table that we are composed of are lighter than air This is almost completely gibberish since you don't find atoms in isolation.

Reluctantly I have to admit my knowledge here is minimal, though I find it extremely interesting. And from another comment I recognized that though I was questioning whether the "soup" was liquid, I was still assuming that this reaction occurred on earth. If I remember correctly I believe all (or probably at least "most") of the basic elements do start out in their elemental form as the result of supernovae. I think this would be a relevant wikipedia article:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supernova_nucleosynthesis

Re: Lab-made primordial soup yields RNA bases

#90

Post by pfdietz »

gmoot wrote: post #68
tlb wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think the idea is failed. Yes, attempts to replicate it in laboratory-scale tanks haven't succeeded yet. But that isn't evidence against the theory that it occurred sometime over millions of years in billions of cubic kilometers of water. It happens at some statistical rate, and lab experiments so far have put an upper bound on the rate.

This is interesting. If we can put an upper bound on the rate (what is it?) we could rule out abiogenesis if we could lower that upper bound sufficiently. Most here seem to reason the other way around - it must have happened, so we'll just keep looking until we figure out how. I'd like to think that we could reach a point at which we could confidently say "this universe doesn't have the probabilistic resources to mak…

I don't see how one could rule it out, since we don't know the number of planets on which the conditions required for abiogenesis could have occurred. It's not limited to the # of planets in the volume of the universe observable from Earth.
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