The messy chemistry that led to life
To understand how chemistry became biology, some chemists are eschewing simple reactions to study complex systems with many reactants and products. Rachel Brazil peers through the tangle
Chemists studying the origins of life have come a long way since 1953 when Urey and Miller’s famous experiment showed that an electric charge could jump-start the formation of amino acids in a flask containing just methane, ammonia, hydrogen and water. Now chemist have found routes to many of the molecules found in biology, including a prebiotically plausible synthetic pathway to a pyrimidine ribonucleotide, starting with only simple organic molecules and inorganic phosphate. It seems that we are getting closer to understanding how a prebiotic soup of chemicals turned into biology.
But some origins of life researchers are not so sure that organic reactions carried out in pristine glassware and laboratory conditions will get us there alone. They say purely understanding synthetic steps doesn’t really explain why and how life started.