Seawater might have supplied the phosphorus required for emerging life.
Researchers from the Universities of Cambridge and Cape Town may have found a solution to the mystery of how phosphorus came to be an essential component of life on Earth by recreating prehistoric seawater containing the element in a laboratory.
Their findings, which were published in the journal
“This could really change how we think about the environments in which life first originated,” said Professor Nick Tosca from the University of Cambridge, who was one of the authors of the study.
The research, which was headed by University of Cambridge Ph.D. student Matthew Brady, reveals that early seawater may have carried 1,000–10,000 times more phosphate than previously thought, provided the water contained a lot of iron.
Phosphate is a crucial component of
Scientists have long suspected that phosphorus became part of biology early on, but they have only recently begun to recognize the role of phosphate in directing the synthesis of molecules required by life on Earth, “Experiments show it makes amazing things happen – chemists can synthesize crucial biomolecules if there is a lot of phosphate in solution,” said Tosca, Professor of Mineralogy & Petrology at Cambridge’s Department of Earth Sciences.
However, there has been debate over the precise circumstances required to create phosphate. According to some research, phosphate should actually be even less accessible to life when iron is plentiful. However, this is disputed since the early Earth’s atmosphere was oxygen-poor and iron would have been widespread.
They used geochemical modeling to simulate the early Earth’s conditions in order to understand how life came to rely on phosphate and the kind of environment that this element…
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