Did Life Spring from Undersea Vents?

T O K Y O,   Feb. 5 -- Japanese researchers report they have managed to re-create the conditions from which life itself may have begun.

Koichiro Matsuno, at the Nagaoka University of Technology, about 170 miles northwest of Tokyo, said he and his colleagues had been able to produce some of the elementary building blocks of which proteins, essential to life, are formed.

In a possible major breakthrough in the never-ending debate about how life started, the team led by Matsuno built an artificial system simulating the environment at undersea thermal vents, where water heated deep below erupts through the seabed into cooler ocean water.

“Many people feel that the hydrothermal vent was where life may have begun, but what was needed was to make a convincing story,” Matsuno told Reuters.

Hot, Cold and Back Again

Writing in the journal Science, Matsuno and his team explained how they simulated a process called “polymerization,” in which complex molecules — in this case oligopeptides, one of the elements that make up protein — are formed from simpler amino acids.

This process was likely to be repeated numerous times, possibly aided “by heating in dry and wet conditions, day-and-night cycles, tidal waves, [and] dry-wet conditions in lagoons,” the authors wrote.

But Matsuno was most interested in the idea of the hydrothermal vent.

“I asked myself where life originated and said, ‘Go down to the hydrothermal vents in the [primordial] sea,’” he recounted.

There, chemical products synthesized in hot vents could re-enter the vents after being quenched in the surrounding cold water and undergo further reactions.

What Matsuno and his team did that was new was to build a flow reactor that emphasized this cycle of heat and cold, then added amino acid glycine, which formed into more complex “oligopeptide” molecules in a stepwise process.

Self-Deprecating Style

Key to the process was the addition of copper ions, which allowed the molecules to grow, Matsuno said.