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NASA Researchers: DNA Building Blocks Can Be Made in Space

“We are star stuff” is becoming “We are comet/meteorite stuff”.

Big news in the astrobiology community today as NASA announced that they have discovered components of DNA in meteorites from Australia and Antarctica. The exact components are called nucleobases, and are the part of DNA involved in base pairing (adenine, guanine, etc.). This points to a possible extra-terrestrial origin for at least part of the primordial soup that became life.

The major concern with findings like this is to ensure that the DNA components you find are not contaminants from Earth. The NASA team worked hard to eliminate this possibility by noting that the meteorites also contain close relatives of nucleobases that are rare or not present on Earth. They also failed to find them in any large amount in the area surrounding the meteorites and used advanced chemistry to show that the nucleobases were formed in completely non-biological reactions (the kind you would see inside a comet, for instance).

This meteorite only carried purine nucleobases (the A and G of DNA and RNA), but previously discovered meteorites (such as the Murchison meteorite) have contained the other base building blocks ( called pyrimidines, the C/T of DNA and the C/U of RNA).

The extraterrestrial origin of nucleic acids and protein building blocks is not a new theory, but this is some of the best evidence yet that space could be the source of some of the keys to life. Commence scrutiny and debate …

(via NASA, image by Chris Smith/NASA)

(via kl0vis-deactivated20111012)