DNA Can Survive Reentry from Space - Study

Loopy the Squirrel

If a cascade of meteors struck Earth billions of years ago, could they have deposited genetic blueprints and forged an indelible link between Earth and another planet?

Perhaps. Although that puzzling question remains unanswered, scientists have uncovered a new clue that suggests it is possible for DNA to withstand the extreme heat and pressure it would encounter when entering our atmosphere from space.

In a new study published today in PLOS ONE, a team of Swiss and German scientists report that they dotted the exterior grooves of a rocket with fragments of DNA to test the genetic material’s stability in space. Surprisingly, they discovered that some of those building blocks of life remained intact during the hostile conditions of the flight and could pass on genetic information even after exiting and reentering the atmosphere during a roughly 13-minute round trip into space.

scientificamerican.com/article/dna-can-survive-reentry-from-space/

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Asteroid impacts may have formed life’s building blocks

A high-powered laser in the Czech Republic has now provided provocative evidence that the hellish conditions produced when an asteroid or comet slams into Earth could have created some key building blocks of life on Earth. In a lab experiment intended to duplicate the high temperatures and pressures of such an impact, researchers used the laser to simultaneously make adenine, guanine, cytosine, and uracil, the four organic compounds in RNA, which many believe to have been the first molecule to encode genetic information.

“This is, I believe, the first time that all four nucleobases have been made in one set of reaction conditions,” says Steven Benner, an astrobiologist at the Foundation for Applied Molecular Evolution in Gainesville, Florida.

http / news .sciencemag.org/biology/2014/12/asteroid-impacts-may-have-formed-life-s-building-blocks

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Groundbreaking Idea About Why Life Exists

http: // www .businessinsider.com/groundbreaking-idea-of-lifes-origin-2014-12?IR=T

rccaulfield

Never liked even debating this it avoids the question of how life began on another planet.

rccaulfield

Never liked even debating this it avoids the question of how life began on another planet.

Streets_of Rage 2 Come_On

With a bit of XNA.

http: //www. newscientist.com/article/dn26641-synthetic-enzymes-hint-at-life-without-dna-or-rna.html#.VHzGI1XF_38


No need for water, made up of rocks like.

maninasia

Life doesn't depend on DNA, life is simply a bunch of information replicating and organising itself using and storing energy in the process. It just happens that all the life we have found so far on Earth is based on DNA.
However even in our lifetimes we should create artificial life (artificial intelligence) based on silicon on some other substrate.
Anyway...the molecule is just the medium for information processing.

Capt'n Midnight

maninasia wrote: »

Life doesn't depend on DNA,

RNA is a much more interesting candidate for life starting as it can act as an enzyme and some strands can speed up their own replication. It's still used in cells to transcribe DNA and help build up amino acids into proteins.

DNA is double stranded so more stable and error free transcription not so hot on the old self replication bit.