Rainwater: Scientists Discover Unexpected Missing Link in the Origin of Life
scitechdaily.com
By Paul Dailing, University of Chicago
August 30, 2024
A fundamental question about the origin of life is how droplets of RNA floating around the primordial soup turned into the membrane-protected packets of life we call cells.
Now, a team of researchers from the University of Chicago’s Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering (UChicago PME), the University of Houston’s Chemical Engineering Department, and the UChicago Chemistry Department have proposed a solution.
In a new study published Science Advances, UChicago PME postdoctoral researcher Aman Agrawal and his co-authors – including UChicago PME Dean Emeritus Matthew Tirrell and Nobel Prize-winning biologist Jack Szostak – show how rainwater could have helped create a meshy wall around protocells 3.8 billion years ago, a critical step in the transition from tiny beads of RNA to every bacterium, plant, animal, and human that ever lived.
“This is a distinctive and novel observation,” Tirrell said.
Reference: “Did the exposure of coacervate droplets to rain make them the first stable protocells?” by Aman Agrawal, Aleksandar Radakovic, Anusha Vonteddu, Syed Rizvi, Vivian N. Huynh, Jack F. Douglas, Matthew V. Tirrell, Alamgir Karim and Jack W. Szostak, 21 August 2024, Science Advances.
DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.adn9657 |
