NASA’s Search for Life-Filled Planets Gets A Boost From Rutgers Scientists!
A group of scientists at Rutgers University are researching how life first began on Earth by finding proteins. They hope that the proteins they find will help people figure out which planets could one day have life.
A study, published on March 10 in the Science Advances journal, could be important for people that are searching for life from outer space. This is because it gives them new ideas to look for, according to Vikas Nanda from the Rutgers Center for Advanced Biotechnology and Medicine.
Rutgers scientists did some experiments and believe that life on Earth started because of a special chemical called ‘Nickelback’. This isn’t related to the famous rock band but its chemical structure includes two nickel atoms inside. A peptide is like part of a protein and it’s made up of basic parts named amino acids.
Scientists think that something happened around 3.5 to 3.8 billion years ago which changed the way things were going from molecules with no life, to programs and systems that made up living creatures. They believe this change was caused by only a few proteins doing important activities in an old metabolic reaction. And now they think they have identified one of these “pioneer peptides”.
A group of scientists from Rutgers is doing research as part of a NASA astrobiology program called ENIGMA. They want to figure out why proteins are so important to life here on Earth.
NASA scientists look for specific things that might show life when they study the universe using telescopes and probes. These “biosignatures” help them detect planets about to have life on them. A kind of peptide called nickelback could be another thing NASA might use to find these potential life-filled worlds, Nanda said.
The researchers were trying to think of a chemical that could have formed on its own in the natural environment. It had to be simple enough so it could start making things all by itself, but it also had to be strong enough to get energy from outside sources in order to keep going.
The researchers wanted to figure out what the simplest form of a protein related to metabolism was. So, they started with complex proteins that already exist today, and then broke them down into simpler parts. After lots of tests and experiments, the scientists finally found the best candidate – Nickelback. It’s made up of thirteen small pieces called amino acids which can attach themselves to two nickel ions.
Scientists thought that nickel was a lot in ancient oceans. When connected to a certain molecule, the nickel atoms acted like helpers, taking electrons and protons from one place to another. This process resulted in creating hydrogen which is also found on Earth in an earlier stage and it could provide energy for anything living at that time.
Nanda said it’s important because there are lots of ideas about how life began, but we don’t do many experiments to test them. Her work proves that we can make simple proteins which act like metabolic enzymes. These proteins stay active for a long time and might be what started life.
A scientist team have written a research paper called “Design of a minimal di-nickel hydrogenase peptide” which was published on 10 March 2023 in the journal Science Advances. They studied how this particular type of protein can interact with hydrogen, and the results are really amazing!
At Rutgers University, eight researchers worked together on a study. These people included: Professor Paul Falkowski and Jennifer Timm from the Environmental Biophysics and Molecular Ecology Program at the School of Environmental and Biological Sciences; Joshua Mancini, Douglas Pike, Saroj Poudel, Alexei Tyryshkin (all postdoctoral associates), and Jan Siess (a doctoral student) from the Center for Advanced Biotechnology and Medicine at Robert Wood Johnson Medical School; as well as Kate Waldie who is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Chemistry and Chemical Biology at the School of Arts and Sciences.
Scientists from the City College of New York were also part of this research.
