Editor’s note: with recent speculation about the potential habitability of other worlds and understanding the processes whereby other biospheres arise and evolve, thought needs to be given to developing sensor […]
Mass spectrometry is a powerful technique that allows scientists to break down and identify the building blocks of just about anything by measuring the mass of the tiny particles of […]
Scientists have uncovered new insights into the protoribosome, a molecular fossil within the ribosome, which plays a key role in the origin of life on Earth. This research, published in […]
Ancient peptides are remnants of early biochemistry that continue to play pivotal roles in current proteins. They are simple molecules yet complex enough to exhibit independent functions, being products of […]
Prebiotic peptide synthesis has consistently been a prominent topic within the field of the origin of life.
The Cassini mission provided evidence for a global subsurface ocean and ongoing hydrothermal activity on Enceladus, based on results from Cassini’s mass spectrometers. Laboratory simulations of hydrothermal conditions on icy […]
The search for the simplest amino acid, glycine (NH2CH2COOH), in the interstellar medium (ISM), has become a never-ending story for astrochemistry and astrophysics researchers because that molecule plays a possible […]
UC Santa Barbara researchers are building out the repertoire of chemical reactions, using light. In a paper published in the journal Nature, chemistry professor Yang Yang and collaborators at the […]
Deciphering the origins of life on a molecular level includes unravelling the numerous interactions that could occur between the most important biomolecules being the lipids, peptides and nucleotides. They were […]
Every protein in your body is made up of the same 20 building blocks called amino acids. But just because nature is stuck with a limited toolkit doesn’t mean humans […]
