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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices
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To: combjelly who wrote (219858)2/19/2005 4:05:26 PM
From: neolib  Read Replies (2) of 1575651
 
Ah, abiogenesis! There are a number of active research programs in this area, most with there hands out for funding <g>

See:

protolife.net

and

carlzimmer.com

From the latter link, RNA, fatty acids and clay look interesting:



One afternoon in the summer of 2002, Szostak was sitting in his office when Hanczyc and Fujikawa walked in with a vial of murky liquid. His students had added a kind of clay known as montmorillonite to their solution of fatty acids. Somehow the clay sped up the rate of vesicle formation 100-fold. “We spent years working on getting the growth and division stuff to work. That was a pain,” says Hanczyc. “But the clay worked the first time.”

Clay had already proved to be potentially important in the origin of life. In the 1990s biochemist James Ferris of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute showed that montmorillonite can help create RNA. When he poured nucleotides onto the surface of the clay, the montmorillonite grabbed the compounds, and neighboring nucleotides fused together. Over time, as many as 50 nucleotides joined together spontaneously into a single RNA molecule. The RNA world might have been born in clay, Ferris argued, perhaps the clay that coated the ocean floor around hydrothermal vents.

“The thing that’s interesting is that there’s this one mineral that can get RNA precursors to assemble into RNA, and membrane precursors to assemble into membranes,” says Szostak. “I think that’s really remarkable.”
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