Pyrimidines had never been found in meteorite samples in significant concentrations - until now.Ī team led by Yasuhiro Oba of Japan's Hokkaido University used the latest in high-res mass spectroscopy tech and analytical techniques to detect miniscule amounts of nucleobases in samples from three different carbon-rich meteorites. This category includes cytosine, uracil and thymine. But DNA and RNA cannot form (and therefore life cannot develop) without the presence of the other kind of nucleobase, which has a larger and more complex structure: Pyrimidines. This category of chemical compound includes guanine and adenine, and have previously been found in meteorites that impacted our planet.
And these molecules can be broken into two categories of what're called nucleobases. They're named adenine, guanine, cytosine, thymine and uracil. Genetics of life as we know it are founded on DNA and RNA, which are composed of five organic molecules. Panspermia was once considered a laughable hypothesis, but the deeper we dig into specimens from space, the less crazy it seems.Ī study outlining the findings appears in this week's issue of the journal Nature Communications. Their discovery boosts the theory of panspermia, which suggests that life, or its building blocks, could be flying around space just waiting to impact a world with the right conditions to help it spring to, well, life. The order of these building blocks in a DNA molecule determines the genetic sequence. Each pair comprises a rung in the spiral DNA ladder.
BUILDING BLOCKS OF DNA ZIP
For the two strands of DNA to zip together, A pairs with T, and C pairs with G. Using state-of-the-art, ultra-high-resolution equipment, scientists have identified important building blocks of DNA and RNA in meteorites, including those that were missing in previous analyses. DNA complexes, like the double crossover, are used as building blocks for the assembly of higher-order structures. DNA is a molecule made up of four chemical bases: adenine (A), cytosine (C), guanine (G), and thymine (T). The notion that the ingredients for life were seeded on Earth by hitching a ride on space rocks becomes more believable the closer we look at those rocks.