1/9/2024 0 Comments Building blocks of dnaJourney of the “bricks of life” between the worlds “This study demonstrates that a variety of meteoric nitrogenous bases could have served as the building blocks of DNA and RNA in the early stages of the formation of the Earth,” says Yasuhiro Oba. Although uracil has been identified in meteorites before, the discovery of all three pyrimidines in space rocks sheds new light on the mysterious rarity of these nitrogenous bases in meteorites compared to purines adenine and guanine. In addition to finding the remaining compounds inside the DNA, Oba and his colleagues also found traces of another pyrimidine called uracil, which is used by RNA, a simpler sister DNA molecule, instead of thymine. Two recently discovered nitrogenous bases belong to a group called pyrimidines, while adenine and guanine belong to the purine category. This discovery is described in a published article in the journal Nature Communications. Now scientists led by Yasuhiro Oba, a professor at Hokkaido University, have finally discovered traces of cytosine and thymine in three carbon-rich meteorites. The researchers guessed that these compounds could also exist in the primary interstellar dust that gave rise to our Solar System about 4.6 billion years ago, but it was not possible to prove this in practice for a long time. But the presence of cytosine and thymine in extraterrestrial objects remained elusive. Adenine and guanine were discovered in meteorites about 50 years ago. Their combinations are arranged in a certain sequence, in which the source code for life on Earth, including humanity, is stored. The key ingredients for the origin of life were discovered in meteoritesĭNA is a helical structure consisting of so-called “nucleobases” - the compounds of adenine, guanine, cytosine and thymine. This discovery suggests that the key ingredients of life could be brought to Earth by ancient extraterrestrial objects. For the first time, all four main components of DNA – the basis of living beings – were discovered in meteorites from space.
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