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 EMBARGOED BY ScienceFOR RELEASE ON Thursday, October 16, 2008 05:00 AM PDTThursday, October 16, 2008 Volcanoes May Have Provided Sparks of First Life Researchers reanalyze classic Miller experiment to uncover role of volcanoes in early life on Earth Scripps Institution of Oceanography / University of California, San Diego EMBARGOED BY SCIENCE FOR RELEASE:OCT. 16, 2008, 11 A.M. U.S. PACIFIC STANDARD TIME New research suggests that lightning and volcanoes may have sparked early life on Earth. Researcher Jeffrey Bada at Scripps Institution of Oceanography at UC San Diego and colleagues reanalyzed Stanley Miller's classic origin of life experiment, offering a new analysis on how the essential building blocks of life may have arisen from volcanic eruptions.  The Bada Lab at Scripps holds the original samples used by Stanley Miller to study the origins of life. "We believed there was more to be learned from Miller's original experiment," said Bada, Scripps professor of marine chemistry and co-author of the paper. "We found that a modern day version of the volcanic apparatus produces a wider variety of compounds." Miller's classic "primordial soup" experiment, published in Science in 1953, is still widely used today in high school chemistry labs to mimic chemical reactions that occur in vapor-rich volcanic eruptions. The experiment circulated methane, ammonia, water vapor and hydrogen in a closed experiment, simulating the earth's early atmosphere and sent a lightning-like spark through it. Over a series of days, organic compounds formed in the mixture, demonstrating how Earth's primitive atmosphere may have given rise to life.  Scripps professor of marine chemisty Jeff Bada produces an electrical spark in an experimental appartatus to show how the atmospheric conditions during volcanic eruptions may have led to early life on Earth. Bada's lab is the first to perform follow up studies using Miller's original apparatus and chemicals samples, which were discovered following Miller's death in 2007. Researchers reanalyzed 11 of the original samples using contemporary analytical chemistry techniques and produced 22 amino acids, the building blocks of proteins, 10 of which had not been identified previously by Miller. "Historically, you don't get many experiments that might be more famous than these; they redefined our thoughts on the origin of life and showed unequivocally that the fundamental building blocks of life could be derived from natural processes," said lead author Adam Johnson, a Indiana University graduate student with the NASA Astrobiology Institute team. Henderson Cleaves (Carnegie Institution for Science), Jason Dworkin and Daniel Glavin (Scripps Institution of Oceanography) and Antonio Lazcano (Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Mexico) also contributed to the report. It was funded with grants from the NASA Astrobiology Institute, the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole, Mass., and Mexico's El Consejo Nacional de Ciencia y Tecnologia. # # # Note to broadcast and cable producers: University of California, San Diego provides an on-campus satellite uplink facility for live or pre-recorded television interviews. Please phone or e-mail the media contact listed above to arrange an interview. Scripps Institution of Oceanography, at University of California, San Diego, is one of the oldest, largest and most important centers for global science research and education in the world. The National Research Council has ranked Scripps first in faculty quality among oceanography programs nationwide Now in its second century of discovery, the scientific scope of the institution has grown to include biological, physical, chemical, geological, geophysical and atmospheric studies of the earth as a system. Hundreds of research programs covering a wide range of scientific areas are under way today in 65 countries. The institution has a staff of about 1,300, and annual expenditures of approximately $155 million from federal, state and private sources. Scripps operates one of the largest U.S. academic fleets with four oceanographic research ships and one research platform for worldwide exploration. |
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