Artificial comet contains building blocks of life
The first molecules of life form naturally in comets, reveals a French-German study led by Uwe Meierhenrich and Cornelia Meinert at the Institut de Chimie de Nice and by Louis Le Sergeant d'Hendecourt at the Institut d'Astrophysique Spatiale (CNRS/France). The researchers produced an artificial comet and, using a technique that is the only one of its kind in the world, they analyzed its chemical composition. For the first time ever, it appeared that comets may contain molecules that made up the earliest genetic material: diamino acids. At the interface of chemistry, biology and astrophysics, this work lends support to the hypothesis that the basic building blocks of life did not appear on Earth but in space. These findings have just been published in the journal ChemPlusChem.