Researchers Offer Novel Findings On The Origins Of Life

A team of scientists from Florida State University College of Medicine have produced data in support of the idea that 10 amino acids believed to exist on Earth around 4 billion years ago were capable of producing proteins in a high-salt environment that would have been able to provide the metabolic activity needed to support the planet's first living organisms.

This life-in-high-salt theory goes against the prevailing theory of how the first life on Earth came to be.

These first living organisms would have been environmentally adaptable microscopic, cell-like organisms that were capable of replicating.

"The current paradigm on the emergence of life is that RNA came first and in a high-temperature environment," said Michael Blaber, the researcher who led the three-year study that was built around investigative techniques nearly two decades in the making. "The data we are generating are much more in favor of a protein-first view in a [high-salt] environment."

Blaber said that a halophile, or salt-loving environment has typically been considered one that life adapted into, rather than started in, but that his findings suggest the opposite.

If his study holds water then it may cause scientists to refocus where they look for evidence in the quest to understand where and how life began.

"Rather than a curious niche that life evolved into, the halophile environment now may take center stage as the likely location for key aspects of abiogenesis," he said, referring to the hypothetical phenomenon by which living organisms are created from nonliving matter.

"Likewise, the role of the formation of proteins takes on additional importance in the earliest steps in the beginnings of life on Earth."

The study is published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.