Biochemists using sunlight managed to create "living" clay "in just 20 hours
According to biblical ideas, God created the first man from clay and breathed life into him. Science, in turn, put forward a theory about the emergence of life in the course of chemical reactions from the "primary soup" (then evolution did its job). It was believed that the ocean was such a "broth". This is how we were taught at school.
However, modern researchers come to a paradoxical conclusion: the candidacy of clay as the "original" material from the scientific point of view looks much more preferable!
NEPTUNE, YOU ARE WRONG
- The first cellular life forms could have arisen not in the ocean, as was commonly believed, but in geothermal ponds filled with condensed steam, says biophysicist Armen Mulkidzhanyan from the University of Osnabrück (Germany).
A team of MSU alumni, which included Mulkidzhanyan, (now scientists work in laboratories in Russia, Germany and the United States) reconstructed the geological conditions in which life arose. The researchers assumed that all cellular organisms had a common ancestor. Having studied the decrypted hereditary material of different representatives of living things, the specialist in comparative genomics Evgeny Kunin (National Center for Biotechnological Information, National Institutes of Health, USA) isolated 60 genes that are found in almost all organisms. This means that we got them from a common ancestor, and only then the paths of ciliates-shoes and humans diverged.
At the same time, an amazing thing became clear - the proteins that encode these ancient genes do not need sodium. This means that life could not originate in the ocean, which is a sodium environment or, more simply, a saline solution. Because the biochemistry of the first living organisms should not have been strikingly different from the environment.
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But the "primitive" proteins needed potassium, phosphorus compounds, zinc and magnesium ions. And the chemical composition of the ocean, even in ancient times, did not meet these expectations. For example, analysis of seawater bubbles trapped in 3.5 billion-year-old rocks showed that the sodium content is 40 times higher than the potassium level.
Most likely, scientists suggest, life originated on land in areas of geothermal activity. According to Doctor of Science Mulkidzhanyan, chemical analysis of steam and gas condensates of Kamchatka's geothermal fields confirms that they contain all that "periodic table" that was necessary for the first living cells. This vapor, condensing, formed puddles and small lakes lined with active minerals.
COLOSSUS ON CLAY FEET
It was clay near the banks of puddles and reservoirs that could be the incubator where life originated. For the first time this hypothesis was expressed by the Scottish chemist Alexander Cairns-Smith several years ago. He assumed that the first "building blocks of life" arose in the micropores of clay rocks, which played the role of a miniature "sand form" - prompting how to line up in the correct structure.
This idea was experimentally confirmed by biochemist James Ferris of the New York Center for the Study of the Origin of Life. He experimented with montmorillonite - a type of thin-layer clay that is capable of strong swelling. It is also used for making cat litter. It turned out that this clay can act as a catalyst that helps organic molecules to self-organize. As soon as the simplest protocells were placed on the surface of the clay, they began to form 100 times faster! A clay "layer cake" (the distance between layers can be 1-2 nanometers) acts as a chemical sponge that absorbs water, metal salts, organic compounds and triggers chemical reactions between them. And then it also protects against ultraviolet radiation, which destroyed everything on Earth,devoid of ancient atmosphere.
And recently there was a joint study by scientists from the University of Kentucky and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. They managed to synthesize this “living clay” in just 20 hours at 90 ° C and normal atmospheric pressure. It remains only to get "in a clay test tube" completely alive from the inanimate (now, at the output, scientists still get a kind of surrogate for a living organism) and the origin of man from clay can be considered proven.
Yaroslav KOROBATOV