Extraterrestrial nucleobases in the Murchison meteorite
arXiv:0806.2286 · doi:10.1016/j.epsl.2008.03.026
Abstract
Carbon-rich meteorites, carbonaceous chondrites, contain many biologically relevant organic molecules and delivered prebiotic material to the young Earth. We present compound-specific carbon isotope data indicating that measured purine and pyrimidine compounds are indigenous components of the Murchison meteorite. Carbon isotope ratios for uracil and xanthine of delta13C=+44.5per mil and +37.7per mil, respectively, indicate a non-terrestrial origin for these compounds. These new results demonstrate that organic compounds, which are components of the genetic code in modern biochemistry, were already present in the early solar system and may have played a key role in life's origin.
31 pages, 4 figures, 3 tables
References in corpus (1)
Cited by in corpus (17)
- Thermodynamic Origin of Life
- A Search for Heterocycles in GOTHAM Observations of TMC-1
- Photostability of gas- and solid-phase biomolecules within dense molecular clouds due to soft X-rays
- An Orbitrap-based laser desorption/ablation mass spectrometer designed for spaceflight
- Seeding the Pregenetic Earth: Meteoritic Abundances of Nucleobases and Potential Reaction Pathways
- The Role of Acetylene in the Chemical Evolution of Carbon Complexity
- Laboratory Studies of Methane and Its Relationship to Prebiotic Chemistry
- Meteorites and the RNA World: A Thermodynamic Model of Nucleobase Synthesis within Planetesimals
- Eta-Earth Revisited II: Deriving a Maximum Number of Earth-like Habitats in the Galactic Disk
- Low temperature formation of pyridine and (iso)quinoline via neutral neutral reactions
- A Material-based Panspermia Hypothesis: The Potential of Polymer Gels and Membraneless Droplets
- Chiral Polymerization in Open Systems From Chiral-Selective Reaction Rates
- Monte Carlo Simulation of Sugar Synthesis on Icy Dust Particles Intermittently Irradiated by UV in a Protoplanetary Disk
- High-Pressure Torsion-Induced Transformation of Adenosine Monophosphate: Insights into Prebiotic Chemistry of RNA by Astronomical Impacts
- optimizing the searches for interstellar heterocycles
- Polarized muons and the origin of biological homochirality
- Could Nucleobases form in the ISM? A Theoretical Study in the Hoursehead nebula