Meteorites Might Have Delivered Vitamin B3 to Earth, Researchers Say

Asteroids might have brought vitamin B3 to Earth, researchers said. The study shows that certain nutrients that made life possible on earth could've come from distant parts of the Universe.

Scientists believe that cosmic radiation cooked-up biological compounds in the early solar system that was initially a dense cloud of gas, dust and ice. These compounds landed on earth with carbon-rich meteorites.

"Vitamin B3, also called nicotinic acid or niacin, is a precursor to NAD (nicotinamide adenine dinucleotide), which is essential to metabolism and likely very ancient in origin," said Karen Smith of Pennsylvania State University in University Park, Pa., according to a news release.

Smith and colleagues found vitamin B3 in eight meteorites that had carbon. The meteorites used in the study were CM-2 carbonaceous chondrites, which are one of the most common class of meteorites found on earth, Livescience reported.

Previously Sandra Pizzarello of Arizona State University, in Tempe, also found vitamin B3 and related molecules called pyridine carboxylic acids in the Tagish Lake meteorite, NASA said in a news release.

Also, researchers found that the level of vitamin in a meteorite was linked to the parent asteroids' tryst with water.

"We discovered a pattern - less vitamin B3 (and other pyridine carboxylic acids) was found in meteorites that came from asteroids that were more altered by liquid water. One possibility may be that these molecules were destroyed during the prolonged contact with liquid water," said Smith in a news release.  

According to the researchers, the vitamin couldn't have come from a terrestrial source because the samples had niacin along with the related molecules. Also, the amount of vitamin in the sample was associated with parent asteroid's alteration by water.

In the next part of the study, researchers plan on conducting tests to understand how niacin can be produced on ice grains in space. "We used pyridine-carbon dioxide ice in the initial experiment," said Smith in a news release. "We want to add water ice (the dominant component of interstellar ices) and start from simpler organic precursors (building-block molecules) of vitamin B3 to help verify our result."