Breakthrough ETH in Chemistry: Guess what’s the secret of life?

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Why do objects live in the world? How could it even be revived? With the development of an entirely new process, ETH researchers and researchers at the University of Geneva are one small step closer to finding the answer to this question that has always plagued humanity. Urea plays an important role in this.

But first, a short trip back to the 1950s: US chemist Stanley Miller (1930-2007) produced a mixture of gases that supposedly formed our planet’s original atmosphere in a critically acclaimed experiment. expose this mixture to the conditions of a storm, as it should have reigned on earth in those primeval times. Numerous different molecules emerged, including urea, a simple molecule that contains both carbon and nitrogen and is very reactive under the right conditions.

It takes urea, space radiation, and many chemical reactions from the primordial soup to DNA.

Researchers now hypothesize that this urea dissolved in the so-called “primitive soup,” that is, accumulating in hot pools of chemical compounds rich in chemical compounds on the still lifeless earth. The concentration of this urea increased in some places due to evaporation.

The keyword is “right conditions”: now, more precisely, cosmic radiation has been added. If this hits different molecules, this radiation can separate individual ions, which, so to speak, begin to look for other molecular compounds – this is how new substances are created.

In chemistry, this process is called synthesis. Research groups from ETH Zurich and the University of Geneva, headed by Hans Jakob Wörner, Professor of Physical Chemistry at ETH Zurich, have now found evidence that so-called melanonic acid is formed from urea in several such synthesis steps. These, in turn, may be the building blocks of RNA and DNA, the acids that carry genetic information.

New measurement method measures chemical reactions in liquids in billionths of a second

To measure how urea behaves under the influence of this type of radiation, researchers led by Wörner needed to develop a new method by which they could observe how chemical reactions in liquids occur within a few billionths of a second. To do this, they developed an apparatus that could create a jet of liquid less than a micrometer in diameter in vacuum. They then exposed this beam of urea to ionizing radiation and measured the reactions that took place within billionths of a second. The reaction that split urea into two different molecules, including the highly reactive pseudo-urea radical, was always the fastest and thus the most common. Urea radicals, on the other hand, are so reactive that it is highly likely that the building blocks of DNA and RNA are formed from them.

However, the research group led by Wörner has not made great progress in investigating the origin of life: the new measurement methods can be applied to various other reactions in liquids.

Source : Blick