Primordial Soup With Julia Child (via airandspace via Pharyngula via bookhling)
Excellent animations and illustrations about what we understand about the origin of life and experiments towards synthetic protocells.
Did Life Evolve in Ice? | Arctic & Antarctic | DISCOVER Magazine
Over a quarter-century, the frozen ammonia-cyanide blend had coalesced into the molecules of life: nucleobases, the building blocks of RNA and DNA, and amino acids, the building blocks of proteins. The vial’s contents would support a new account of how life began on Earth and would arouse both surprise and skepticism around the world.
Origin of life research is a fascinating part of synthetic biology. In order to get a better idea of what happened so many billions of years ago, researchers have to actually attempt to re-create life’s building blocks in the lab (or fail to do so, as the experiments disproving spontaneous generation in the 17th century did so convincingly). This experiment (which I just learned about thanks to wikipedia!) shows that some organic molecules could be generated even without the high energy inputs of the original Miller-Urey experiments, with totally awesome implications for astrobiology.
Anyway, I anticipate a lot more posts about origin of life research in the near future, as I am going to be giving a lecture on it quite soon. I’d love to hear any comments and questions you may have as I develop my ideas!
