![]() ![]() The theory was appealing, and solved many of the basic problems with existing ideas that life may have been carried to Earth on a comet or asteroid or that genetic material emerged first – the “RNA World” hypothesis. “The thought was that making methanethiol from these basic ingredients at seafloor hydrothermal vents should therefore have been an easy process,” adds Reeves. ![]() Could methanethiol be the bridge between a chemical, non-living world and the first microbial life on the planet?Ĭarbon dioxide, hydrogen and sulfide are the common ingredients present in hydrothermal black smoker fluids. The question Reeves and his colleagues set out to test was whether methanethiol-a critical precursor of life – could form at modern day vent sites by purely chemical means without the involvement of life. Scientists suspected methanethiol could have been the “starter dough” from which all life emerged. A central figure in this hypothesis is a simple sulfur-containing carbon compound called “methanethiol” – a supposed geologic precursor of the Acetyl-CoA enzyme present in many organisms, including humans. Inspired by these findings, scientists later proposed that hydrothermal vents provided an ideal environment with all the ingredients needed for microbial life to emerge on early Earth. In 1977, scientists discovered biological communities unexpectedly living around seafloor hydrothermal vents, far from sunlight and thriving on a chemical soup rich in hydrogen, carbon dioxide, and sulfur, spewing from the geysers. The work is published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Science. Instead, their findings could provide a focus for the search for life on other planets. Recent research by geochemists Eoghan Reeves, Jeff Seewald, and Jill McDermott at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) is the first to test a fundamental assumption of this ‘metabolism first’ hypothesis, and finds that it may not have been as easy as previously assumed. One possibility has grown in popularity in the last two decades – that simple metabolic reactions emerged near ancient seafloor hot springs, enabling the leap from a non-living to a living world. Scientists have determined approximately when life began (roughly 3.8 billion years ago), but there is still intense debate about exactly how life began. One of the greatest mysteries facing humans is how life originated on Earth. ![]()
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