Life on a faraway planet—if it's out there—might not look anything like life on Earth. But there are only so many chemical ingredients in the universe's pantry, and only so many ways to mix them. A team led by scientists at the University of Wisconsin–Madison has exploited those limitations to write a cookbook of hundreds of chemical recipes with the potential to give rise to life.
Their ingredient list could focus the search for life elsewhere in the universe by pointing out the most likely conditions—planetary versions of mixing techniques, oven temperatures and baking times—for the recipes to come together.to the complex cycles of cell metabolism and reproduction that define life, the researchers say, requires not only a simple beginning but also repetition.
"It was thought that these sorts of reactions are very rare," says Kaçar."We are showing that it's actually far from rare. You just need to look in the right place." To be autocatalytic, the outcome of the reaction also needs to provide starting materials for the reaction to occur again, so the output becomes a new input says Zach Adam, a co-author of the study and a UW–Madison geoscientist studying the origins of life on Earth. Comproportionation reactions result in multiple copies of some of the molecules involved, providing materials for the next steps in autocatalysis.
Autocatalysis is like a growing population of rabbits. Pairs of rabbits come together, produce litters of new rabbits, and then the new rabbits grow up to pair off themselves and make even more rabbits. It doesn't take many rabbits to soon have many more rabbits.
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