Which building blocks of life have been found in space, and which haven't?

 

Image courtesy of Shutterstock/nobeastsofierce

Joel Kontinen

How many building blocks of life have we found in space so far?

First, it's important to define what we mean by the building blocks of life. Scientists are looking for molecules that look like those found in life on Earth, including proteins; RNA; and lipids, the fatty molecules that make up cell membranes.

The building block of life cannot form life as such, Much more is needed. They have to be put together with intelligent design. 

 The asteroid Bennu, brought back to Earth in 2023, contained all five nucleobases of DNA and RNA, along with 14 of the 20 amino acids used by living organisms. Its sibling asteroid Ryugu also yielded all five nucleobases, including uracil, which is found in RNA.

Astronomers categorize the molecules ca they find by complexity, starting with a broad group called "complex organic molecules" (COM). These are carbon-containing molecules with six or more atoms. Of the 350 molecules of any kind discovered in space so far, "about 180 of them qualify as COMs," Sergio Ioppolo, an astrochemist and an associate professor in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at Aarhus University in Denmark, said. "That cutoff is an operational convention rather than a fundamental definition of complexity."

Some of the richest hunting grounds for these molecules are in molecular clouds ‪— interstellar regions of gas and dust that are dense enough for molecules to form. Using radio astronomy, Izaskun Jiménez-Serra, an astrochemist and staff researcher at the Center for Astrobiology in Spain, and her team have detected more than a dozen prebiotic molecules in molecular clouds at the center of the Milky Way, including the four-carbon sugar erythrulose   

They have also found a true sugar in space.

Source:

Ashley Hamer Pritchard  Edited by Laura Geggel, Laura Mondragón 2026 Which building blocks of life have been found in space, and which haven't? | Live Science 16 August

 

 

How did we get our phosphorus that is needed for our dna and rna?

 

Image courtesy of   Lucy Entwisle, fair use doctrine.

Joel Kontinen 

Life on Earth may have begun with a flash of  lightning.

According to evolutionists, the answer to how we got the phosphorus it needed to make the first DNA and RNA molecules might be in the sky.  A new study, lead by Benjamin Hess, a graduate student at Yale University's Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences said that "Lightning strikes may have therefore played a role in providing phosphoros . …we show for the first time that lightning strikes were likely a significant source of reactive phosphorus on Earth around the time that life formed 3.5 billion to 4.5 billion years ago,"

Phosphorus (P) is one of our planet’s general chemical elements. Without it we would not have RNA , DNA and our ATP, and thus we would not have life.

Just recently, we heard that life could start on Venus, which was  later proved to be false.

Source:

Specktor, Brandon. Billions of lightning bolts may have jump-started life on Earth, study suggests Live Science  13 March.

 

Early 'Soda Lakes' Have Provided Missing Ingredient Key to the Origin of Life

Matthew Dillon, CC BY 2.0.



Joel Kontinen

Lakes that thrived in dry locations on early Earth likely played a key role in supplying phosphorus, researchers wrote in a new study published Dec. 30 in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Phosphorus is crucial to life, Without it we not have it.

Phosphorus is crucial to life as we know it. The mineral helps form the backbone of DNA and RNA molecules; anchors lipids, or fats, that separate cells from the environment around them; and helps provide life energy, serving as the main component in molecules such as adenosine triphosphate, or ATP.

The finding explains how this scarce mineral became abundant in Earth's primordial soup. Put more plainly, it helps scientists understand how life likely arose. "For 50 years, what's called 'the phosphate problem,' has plagued studies on the origin of life," study co-researcher Jonathan Tone , a research assistant professor of Earth and space sciences at the University of Washington, said in a statement.

The building blocks of proteins, DNA and RNA — in essence, the key ingredients of life, the researchers said.

As a result, some of the phosphate is freely available in the water, according to experiments done by Toner and Catling.

"The extremely high phosphate levels in these lakes and ponds would have driven reactions that put phosphorus into the molecular building blocks of RNA, proteins and fats, all of which were needed to get life going," Catling said in the statement.

About 4 billion years ago , early Earth's carbon dioxide-rich air would have helped create such lakes with high phosphorus levels, the researchers said.


Now,who made this transition?
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This study complements another paper the two researchers published in 2019, which shows that soda lakes can also supply ample cyanide, a chemical that is deadly to humans but not to primitive microbes. Cyanide could have supported the formation of amino acids and nucleotides, the building blocks of proteins, DNA and RNA — in essence, the key ingredients of life, the researchers said.

Source.

Geggel, Laura. 2020. Early 'Soda Lakes' May Have Provided Missing Ingredient Key to the Origin of Life Live Science 2 January.

Biodiversity on Some Alien Planets May Dwarf That of Earth

Kepler-62f. Image courtesy of NASA/Ames/JPL-Caltech.



Joel Kontinen

It seems that we don't have optimum ocean-circulation patterns on Earth.

"Earth's dazzling biodiversity may not be so remarkable in the cosmic scheme of things, a new study suggests.

Alien planets with more favourable ocean-circulation patterns might support life in even greater abundance and variety than our own world does, the study determined.

"Life in Earth's oceans depends on upwelling (upward flow), which returns nutrients from the dark depths of the ocean to the sunlit portions of the ocean where photosynthetic life lives," study leader Stephanie Olson, of the University of Chicago, said in a statement."

However, we do not know the state of affair on exoplanets. We do not know, for instance, if a planet's contains phosphorus, without which which we would not have RNA , DNA, and our ATP, and thus we would not have life. And also if it contains all ingredients that make life necessary.



Source:

Wall, Mike. Biodiversity on Some Alien Planets May Dwarf That of Earth. Space.com. (23.8.).

Where Did We Get Our Phosphorus?

Image courtesy of Lorrie Graham/AusAID, CC BY 2.0.



Joel Kontinen


Phosphorus (P) is one of our planet’s general chemical elements. Without it we would not have RNA , DNA and our ATP, and thus we would not have life.

“’Phosphorus is one of the key elements in biology.’ says Matthew Pasek, an astrobiologist and geochemist at the University of South Florida.”

Now, Pasek, is on a search for who we got our phosphorus in the beginning. “Unlike the other elements essential for life, phosphorus is mainly found in solid form, whereas the likes of hydrogen, oxygen and nitrogen are often found as a gas.“ [Studying phosphorus] keeps us grounded in actual hard rock samples. Unlike the others, there is no obvious gas form, so has to come from rock sources,” Pasek says.

Meteorites also contain phosphorus. In Pasek’s thinking, published in the journal Icarus, “found that most phosphorus should be in a solid form everywhere in the Solar System, out to about Saturn.”

Mikhail Zolotov, thinks that Pasek’s work ok, but “it is contentious that gas movement toward the Sun, which was not modeled in the paper, could be faster than the diffusion of gas away from the Sun.”

Source:

Wild, Sarah , 2018. How Phosphorus Came in From the Cold. Astrobiology Magazine (September 6).

Precise Gene Regulation: MicroRNAs Challenge Darwinian Explanations

No room for Darwinian randomness in the miRNA world. Image courtesy of Kelvinsong, Creative Commons (CC BY 3.0).




Joel Kontinen

Randomness is one of the keywords of Darwinian evolution, but we see an entirely different picture in the real word. Take, for instance, the part of our genome once dismissed as junk because researchers did not know what it did.

Now, researchers are beginning to understand that non-coding RNA has several essential functions. According to an article posted on News Medical:

“Gene expression in cells and tissues of every complex organism is precisely controlled and largely dependent on different conditions (such as development, changes in the environment, diseases or drugs). Various cells and organ systems within such organism (including humans) contain different gene expression profiles, thus proper understanding of regulatory mechanisms involved in such expression represents one of the key issues in genomic medicine.”

The language is anything but Darwinese, and there’s more to come:

“Non-coding RNA molecules have a role in plethora of regulatory events – from controlling the number of copies in bacterial division to X-chromosome inactivation in mammals. Recent analyses of the human and animal genomes have shown that most of RNA transcripts do not code for proteins (i.e. they are messenger RNAs or mRNAs), but are instead noncoding RNAs (ncRNAs).

MicroRNAs (or miRNAs) comprise a novel class of small, non-coding endogenous RNAs that regulate gene expression by directing their target mRNAs for degradation or translational repression. Their discovery added a new dimension to the understanding of complex gene regulatory networks in humans and animals alike.”

The article also highlights the importance of microRNAs:

“miRNAs represent small RNA molecules encoded in the genomes of plants and animals. These highly conserved 22 nucleotides long RNA sequences regulate the expression of genes by binding to the 3'-untranslated regions (3'-UTR) of specific mRNAs. A growing body of evidence shows that miRNAs are one of the key players in cell differentiation and growth, mobility and apoptosis (programmed cell death).”

In other words, there is nothing even remotely Darwinian in microRNAs.

Medical researchers can no longer ignore the existence of miRNAs as we have roughly a thousand of them and they appear to be vital for our health.

In the animal kingdom, they have knocked down Darwin’s Tree of Life.

Other forms of RNA are likewise timely reminders of the defects of evolution. Messenger RNA plays a major role in wound healing.

Source:

Meštrović, Tomislav. 2015. What is MicroRNA? News Medical (25 January).

RNA World Theory Is Wrong, New Research Suggests

Image courtesy of Blausen.com staff. Blausen gallery 2014. Wikiversity Journal of Medicine, Creative Commons.


Joel Kontinen

Naturalistic theories of the origin and early evolution of life share a common feature: they don’t work.

A recent article in New Scientist acknowledges:

“Life has a chicken-and-egg problem: enzymes are needed to make nucleic acids – the genetic material – but to build them you need the genetic information contained in nucleic acids. So most researchers assume that the earliest life, long before the evolution of cells, consisted of RNA molecules. These contain genetic information but can also fold into complex shapes, so could serve as enzymes to help make more RNA in their own image – enabling Darwinian evolution on a molecular level.”

This does not address the mystery (in the naturalistic /materialistic view) of the origin of genetic information. As we know, information always requires a sender. And intelligent information requires an intelligent sender.

Evolution has never been good at predicting the past, and when it comes to the RNA world, it fares no better. Loren Williams, a biochemist at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta, thinks that it involves a scenario that does not work.

New Scientist sums up the replacement view:

“It was thought that life originated solely with self-replicating RNA – the ‘RNA world’. But new evidence suggests RNA co-evolved with proteins from the very beginning.”

Almost correct, but it’s a bit more complicated and one would need to weed out the surviving Darwinese. There’s no evidence that RNA or proteins evolved. They were part and parcel of the original living entity.



Source:

Holmes, Bob. 2015. Why 'RNA world' theory on origin of life may be wrong after all. New Scientist 3027, 10. (24 June) (accessing the article requires registration/subscription).

Evolution’s Enigma: How to Get DNA, Proteins and RNA at the Same Time

Image courtesy of the Institute for Creation Research.




Joel Kontinen

Naturalistic explanations of how the cell evolved into such an efficient entity defy common sense. In a recent article in The Behemoth, biologist Ann Gauger outlines the problem:

“DNA is copied into RNA, then RNA is translated into protein. Consequently, proteins cannot exist without DNA. However, DNA cannot exist without proteins either.”

Needless to say, their relationship is anything but simple:

“To replicate DNA, one protein unwinds the DNA, creating a fork with two strands; another protein duplicates the right strand of the DNA, while yet another casts off loops from the left strand so it can be copied. Meanwhile, thirty or so other proteins keep watch over the DNA, proofreading, correcting, and ensuring very few errors -- about one mistake per billion nucleotides copied.

In short, it's a chicken and egg problem: which came first, proteins or DNA? ”

But there’s more:

“Even if that problem could be solved, another puzzle would remain: how the link between DNA, RNA, and protein came about. We know how it's done -- ribosomes -- but we have no idea how ribosomes came to be. Ribosomes are indispensable, efficient, self-correcting, decoding machines, and protein factories. They are made of many proteins woven together with RNA molecules into tangled knots that somehow work together to decode RNA. In fact, just deciphering into what shape those knots are tied won three scientists the 2009 Nobel Prize in Chemistry.

Born in the nucleus, ribosomes do their work in the cytoplasm. Messenger RNA (RNA copied from a protein-coding gene) finds a ribosome and begins feeding through like ticker tape. The ribosome reads the message and translates it into amino acids, stitching the amino acids together to make a protein.”

300 years ago King David penned the words ”I praise you because I am fearfully and wonderfully made; your works are wonderful, I know that full well.” (Psalm 139:14, NIV).

Recent discoveries in cell biology are beginning to show that the ancient Psalmist was right. Our cells are tiny but amazing. Dr. Gauger goes on to say:

“Though not as fast as transcription, the ribosome manages a respectable rate of 6 to 9 amino acids per second, a little faster than the best of our typists. But consider this: there are 20-plus amino acids for the ribosome to sort through in order to find the right one for each unit to be translated. Given that kind of search process, 6 to 9 amino acids per second puts the ticker tape on fast forward.

One last thing -- the ribosome is also self-correcting. As the protein advances, the ribosome double-checks its work, and if it notices a mistake, it backs up to correct the error, like I had to do as I typed this sentence.

Suffice it to say that the genetic code, and the fidelity of its replication, transcription, and translation, are obviously very important, considering all the error correction that goes on, and they are interdependent, highly optimized processes that are essential to life. At the very center of these processes is this mystery: which came first, the protein or the DNA? And how was the link between DNA and protein established? Some say RNA came first, but RNA is inherently unstable, easily degraded and limited in its chemical abilities. So the problem remains unsolved.”

It is no accident that Dr. Gauger’s article is called Mystery at the Heart of Life.

Materialists/naturalists would need many miracles to solve that enigma but their worldview does not have room for a miracle maker.

Source:

Gauger, Ann. 2014. Mystery at the Heart of Life. The Behemoth. (November 27).