A Golf-sized rock clues at the evolution of life’s building blocks on Earth.
New Delhi | Jagran Trending Desk:
A Golf-sized rock, which was found in Antarctica back in 2012, offers clues at the evolution of life’s building blocks. The Japanese and Belgian scientists found the meteorite and named it as Asuka 12236. At that time, the stone appeared as a coal-black material against the snow-white environment of the white continent. The scientists have preserved Asuka 12236 because they believed that this is one and only meteorite of such kind and now the scientists are expecting that the Asuka holds the microscopic clues to resolve evolution mystery.
It has been a huge question on history and science that how did the building blocks of life flourish on Earth. Now the NASA scientist found a clue while studying the primitive meteorite. According to a report published in Space Daily, “Under the glare of the fluorescent lights and accompanied by the whir of analytical tools running in the background, the NASA Goddard team first crushed a 50-milligram pinch of Asuka 12236 in their lab with a mortar and pestle. Then they suspended the amino acids from the ancient dust in a water solution and sent the liquid through a powerful analytical machine that separated the molecules inside by mass and identified each kind.”
The researchers found that the meteorite contains the amino acids locked up inside Asuka, it shows the abundance of different proteins in the meteorite. It shows that the arrangement of these amino acids and millions of proteins can resolve the mystery of life building blocks because such an arrangement was never found. A few of such arrangements were found in a similarly preserved meteorite named Paris, but it could not solve the history.
The Goodard researcher, Galvin said, “The meteorites are telling us that there was an inherent bias toward left-handed amino acids before life even started.” However, Galvin himself trying to find out why this happened.
Posted By: Srishti Goel
