Clay May Have Been Birthplace of Life On Earth, New Study Suggests

Science Daily ^ | 5 NOV 2013 | Cornell University group

[onedoug]

Clay, a seemingly infertile blend of minerals, might have been the birthplace of life on Earth. Or at least of the complex biochemicals that make life possible, Cornell University biological engineers report in the Nov. 7 online issue of the journal Scientific Reports, published by Nature Publishing.

[onedoug]

Wife and I went to breakfast and I was rereading Hazen, re #8 and came over something I had earlier highlighted to the effect that he ultimately saw more promise in crystallography, placing emphasis on it’s chirality, or “handedness”: “Virtually all known prebiotic synthesis pathways produce chiral molecules in 50:50 mixtures. No obvious inherent reason exits why left or right should be preferred. And yet living cells display the most exquisite selectivity, choosing right-handed sugars over left and left handed amino acids over right. In spite of a century and a half of study, the origin of this biochemical “homochirality” remains a central mystery of life’s emergence.”

So it turns out that he isn’t as wedded to clays as I thought, pointing out for one that the myriad micro-assemblages present in clays makes it frustrating to get a handle on any one “bio-type” molecule as it were.

So it was a fairly interesting read until breakfast came....

Fascinating stuff though.