On the origin of species

Water droplets hold the secret ingredient to creating life from non-living chemicals, per new research published Monday in the peer-reviewed journal PNAS.

🧬 A deeper dive… Scientists at Purdue University put more than a decade of work into producing the study. What were they focused on that whole time? Peptides, aka strings of amino acids that are the building blocks for proteins – which in turn, are the building blocks for life.

• For the first time in history, the Purdue researchers showed peptides can spontaneously form in droplets of water as a result of rapid reactions that occur when those droplets meet Earth’s atmosphere.
• Theoretically, this peptide formation could also have occurred on Earth ~4 billion years ago, when life first arose.

🌊 The bottom line: “Places where sea spray flies into the air and waves pound the land, or where fresh water burbles down a slope, were fertile landscapes for life’s potential evolution,” said Graham Cooks, one of the study’s three authors. “This is essentially the chemistry behind the origin of life.”

+Dive deeper: How did life evolve to how we know it today?