Author Topic: Life's handshake  (Read 958 times)

Sriram

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Life's handshake
« on: June 15, 2016, 03:06:37 PM »

Hi everyone,

Here is an article about complex molecules forming in interstellar space.

http://phys.org/news/2016-06-life-handshake-chiral-molecule-interstellar.html

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Like a pair of human hands, certain organic molecules have mirror-image versions of themselves, a chemical property known as chirality. These so-called "handed" molecules are essential for biology and have intriguingly been found in meteorites on Earth and comets in our Solar System. None, however, has been detected in the vast reaches of interstellar space, until now.

"This is the first molecule detected in interstellar space that has the property of chirality, making it a pioneering leap forward in our understanding of how prebiotic molecules are made in the Universe and the effects they may have on the origins of life," said Brett McGuire, a chemist and Jansky Postdoctoral Fellow with the National Radio Astronomy Observatory (NRAO) in Charlottesville, Virginia.

Every living thing on Earth uses one, and only one handedness of many types of chiral molecules. This trait, called homochirality, is critical for life and has important implications for many biological structures, including DNA's double helix. Scientists do not yet understand how biology came to rely on one handedness and not the other. The answer, the researchers speculate, may be found in the way these molecules naturally form in space before being incorporated into asteroids and comets and later deposited on young planets.

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For information.

Cheers.

Sriram