Evaporating acids are the key to life

The evaporation of serine clusters might have been involved in the early processes of life on earth according to researchers from Purdue University, US.

Serine is a strange amino acid. It uniquely forms highly stable octamers, that are chirally selective and these have been observed using electrospray mass spectroscopy. However, chemists are divided on how these octamers are formed: some believe they are distinct entities, existing in solution; some believe they are artefacts of the electrospray process used to volatilise the sample for mass spectrometry. Graham Cooks and Zoltán Takáts shed more light on the matter. They evaporated solutions of l-serine from a hot surface and sampled the resulting vapour using a mass spectrometer.

They concluded that the octamers are present on the surface of an evaporating droplet and perhaps in its bulk. Cooks hints that clustering of amino acids like this may have played a role in the development of early life: ’Evaporation of aqueous solutions on hot surfaces was presumably a feasible event on the surface of a young Earth’, he explains.

Ian Farrell