We May Have Just Unlocked a Secret to How Life on Earth Began
Scientists have been trying to piece together the chemical recipe for how the building blocks of life originated. Now, they may have found it.
How did life begin? This is one of the biggest unanswered questions in science today, and is the backbone of our burning questions about who we are, where we come from, and if we’re alone out here. New research has now given us clues into how exactly the fundamental molecular building blocks of life came together in the first place.
Because that’s the central question: in the big puddly soup of pre-biotic earth, how did the perfect ingredients for life form, much less fuse together into something that stores information and can replicate independently.
A cell’s most important components are DNA, RNA and a ribosome. DNA codes all of the cell’s essential information about what the organism is and how it works, but is kept safe all huddled away in the nucleus.
To take that information and make it into actual stuff, like proteins, a ribosome copies sections of the DNA and makes strands of RNA, which are a one-sided version of DNA that can then act like little messages to the rest of the cell for what to do and what to make.
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