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" In a new study out today, scientists may have taken another key step toward explaining how genetic materials\u2014and life\u2014may have first formed on the Earth.  The molecule is question is called formamide. It&amp;#039;s pretty simple; the molecular formula is NH2CHO. It&amp;#039;s incredibly abundant in our universe, appearing in absurdly huge interstellar clouds, and is believed to be a vital component of almost all infantile, planet-forging star systems. And some researchers think formamide could have a key player in the origin of life. Last December, for example, a team of Czech researchers discovered that the energy you&amp;#039;d get form a comet or asteroid impact would be enough to instantaneously transform formamide into many of the molecular letters of our genetic alphabet. That surprising discovery had pretty profound implications, leaving many to wonder if such impacts on our young Earth could have heralded the dawn of life. But the puzzle was incomplete: While the Czech researchers could account for the genesis of the letters inside DNA, they couldn&amp;#039;t account for the spine of the molecule\u2014the sugars and phosphate groups that hold everything together to form the iconic double helix.  In this new study, a team of Italian and Russian scientists has solved half that problem. In a science paper published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, they found that simply bombarding formamide (alongside various ground-up meteorites) with solar wind\u2014the stream of charged particles from the sun\u2014could spawn a veritable alphabet soup of life&amp;#039;s necessary molecules, including the sugary half of that missing genetic spine. Easy to make The experiments led by Raffaele Saladino, an astrochemist at Tuscia University, Italy, were relatively straightforward and designed to mimic chemical reactions that could naturally take place on a meteor&amp;#039;s surface in the harsh environment of space. The scientists simply combined pure formamide with the ground-up powder of various meteorites in a vial kept at the cold temperature of space. They then blasted these cold vials with a proton laser beam to simulate the proton particle deluge of everyday solar wind. Finally, they painstakingly combed through the resultant slew for any organic compounds.  &amp;quot;The components we used\u2014solar wind, [rock], and formamide\u2014are very, very common. This tells us that the molecules required for origin of life are very easily synthesized,&amp;quot; he says. Taken together, different formamide-meteor combinations produced everything from sugary glucose to fatty glycerol\u2014a wide-ranging list of more than 25 different molecules used by DNA and life in general. And most surprising of all was &amp;quot;the formation of nucleosides, which are really difficult to produce,&amp;quot; Saladino says. Those nucleosides are the sugary chunks that form DNA&amp;#039;s backbone. They have never been synthesized with such ease, he says. &amp;quot;This is the first study to look into stimulating formamide with solar [wind], and provides a very strong support that formamide is a central molecule in [pre-life] chemistry, &amp;quot; says Svatopluk Civi\u0161, a chemist at the Central European Institute of Technology in the Czech Republic. Civi\u0161 lead the aforementioned study of formamide from last December, but was not involved in this new research.  Building blocks? Now that scientists have shown that formamide can create the letters of DNA and these nucleosides, the part that&amp;#039;s still missing are the phosphate chunks, which, alongside sugars, help form the spine of the double helix. However, phosphates are inorganic compounds that are commonly found in minerals on the surface of planetary bodies, including Earth and Mars&amp;#039;s. Saladino has a hunch &amp;quot;that all that&amp;#039;s required may be the presence of the planet surface,&amp;quot; to produce the rest of the DNA molecule. He&amp;#039;s currently working on including pulverized phosphate-containing minerals in future formamide experiments to see whether the whole picture comes together.  If Saladino and colleagues are correct, then it&amp;#039;s possible that formamide reactions could have created some of the first building blocks for life on Earth, which were delivered via meteors and asteroids. But what does this say about the potential for life outside Earth? Saladino and Civi\u0161 both say that given the widespread nature of formamide (a fairly stable molecule which appears to form under a wide range of conditions) this new research suggests that &amp;quot;these basic ingredients for life could be abundantly diffused throughout the universe,&amp;quot; Saladino says. &amp;quot;But just because the molecules required for the origin of life are very easily synthesized, that doesn&amp;#039;t mean life is equally easy to create. Molecules are one thing. Life may require time, opportunity, and much more complexity.&amp;quot; "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.popularmechanics.com/science/environment/a15061/formamide-origin-of-life-on-earth/>