New Breakthroughs - Studying the Origin of Life
John D. Sutherland, a prebiotic chemist at the University of Manchester has soved a problem long troubling scientists studying how natural chemicals could have created the building blocks for life.
One scientific theory for the origin of life has been that the earliest forms of life were based on RNA, which is closely related to DNA. A problem with this theory has been that there is no plausible explanation of how these RNA molecules natually formed. There has been no explainable method for nucleotides, the building blocks of RNA, to joint together. Nucleotides consist of a phosphate groupd, a ribose (or sugar molecule), and a chemical base. While each of these components can be producted, on one has explained how these join naturally to form a nucleotide.
In an article in Nature, Sutherland nad his coleagues explained that the starting chemicals could be caused to react in an order not previously considered which would allow nucleotiddes to spontaneously assemble.
