This is an interesting
addition. Right handed amino acids are a
necessary precursor to the formation of core sugar molecules. Again the formulation of life remains a long
way off but we are seeing more of the chemistry.
There is much to come and
unfortunately, nature is going to reveal it all one step at a time.
We have seen a smattering of
clues over the past few years yet I suspect that the path will be long.
Scientists discover new clue to the chemical origins of life
by Staff Writers
All biological molecules have an ability to exist as left-handed forms
or right-handed forms.
Organic chemists at the University
of York
A team led by Dr Paul Clarke in the Department of Chemistry at York
Working with colleagues at the University of Nottingham
All biological molecules have an ability to exist as left-handed
forms or right-handed forms. All sugars in biology are made up of the
right-handed form of molecules and yet all the amino acids that make up the
peptides and proteins are made up of the left-handed form.
The researchers found using simple left-handed amino acids to
catalyse the formation of sugars resulted in the production of predominately
right-handed form of sugars. It could explain how carbohydrates originated and
why the right-handed form dominates in nature.
Dr Clarke said: "There are a lot of fundamental questions about
the origins of life and many people think they are questions about biology.
But for life to have evolved, you have to have a moment when non-living things
become living - everything up to that point is chemistry.
"We are trying to understand the chemical origins of life. One of
the interesting questions is where carbohydrates come from because they are the
building blocks of DNA and RNA.
What we have achieved is the first step on that pathway to show how simple
sugars -threose and erythrose-originated. We generated these sugars from a
very simple set of materials that most scientists believe were around at the
time that life began."
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