Scientists Discover How Life is Formed Out of Dead Matter

Scientists have long wondered how life can originate from a pile of dead matter - a secret a team of researchers at the Max Planck Institut fur Kohlenforschung believe they have revealed in a new study.

Since the 1960s, scientists have known that when concentrated hydrogen cyanide (HCN) is irradiated by UV light, it forms an imidazole intermediate key for synthesis of nucleobases and nucleotides in abiotic environments.

How UV radiation acts in this reaction to produce complex organic matter has never been clear, however.

That is, until now.

A team of international researchers led by Mario Barbatti have shown how this process occurs via computer simulations.

Using diverse computational-chemistry methods, the team arrived at the surprising conclusion that the reaction does not take place in the hot spot created by the solar radiation.

"This has nothing to do with heat, but with electrons," Barbatti explained in a press release on the study, meaining it could work in a cold environment, such as a comet or terrestrial ices where spontaneous HCN polymerization is most expected to occur.

The way it works, the researchers explained, is the molecules get into the "electronic excited state" due to UV radiation, meaning their electrons are distributed in a much different manner than is usually the case. This then changes the molecule's "attitudes."

"But this takes some time," Barbatti said.

The researchers showed that the radiation energy is dissipated too fast, and because of that each reactant molecule absorbs hundreds of UV photons before it finally gets converted into the imidazole intermediate in a way that the scientist describes as "very inefficient - and quite extraordinary."

It was for this reason that the reaction was so challenging to comprehend, the researchers explained, forcing the group to go through "a lot" of possible intermediates before finally discovery the only pathway consistent with the fast energy dissipation and previous experimental observations.

As to why the group was forced to turn to a computer in order to run a chemistry experiment, Barbatti explained that to do it in a traditional format would have been impossible.

"Some intermediates are too elusive to analyze them in the laboratory - they disappear before we may see them," Barbatti said.