Artist impression of the molecule glycine together with dark interstellar clouds in the lab. “In the laboratory, we have simulated the conditions in dark interstellar clouds: 10-20 K (-263 C to -253 C)cold dust particles are covered by thin layers of abundant ices – frozen CO, NH3, CH4 and H2O – and subsequently processed by impacting atoms causing precursor species to fragment and reactive intermediates to recombine,” lead author Ioppolo said in a press release. The article is titled “ A non-energetic mechanism for glycine formation in the interstellar medium.” Ioppolo is the lead author of a new article published this week in Nature Astronomy. “Dark chemistry means chemistry without the need of energetic radiation,” says Sergio Ioppolo from Queen Mary University in London. Those simulations produced methylamine, a pre-cursor to glycine, and then showed that glycine itself can form. The creation of glycine without energy from a star is termed “dark chemistry.” Now a team of researchers have made laboratory simulations of the inside of dark interstellar clouds. This has implications for how widespread this simplest of building blocks can be, and possibly how likely life is to arise. Finding glycine in comets means that it can be produced without the direct input of stellar energy. They formed directly out of the solar nebula when the planets and the Sun were about to form. Image Credit: ESA/Rosetta/OSIRISĬomets are considered ancient, primordial objects. In this image, Rosetta’s scientific camera OSIRIS shows the sudden onset of a well-defined jet-like feature emerging from the side of the comet’s neck, in the Anuket region. Scientists detected glycine in the coma of comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko. And without that understanding, we’ll never figure out how life got started here on Earth. But our understanding of how complex molecular building blocks form is far from complete. And in recent years, scientists have detected other complex organic molecules (COMs) in meteorites. Scientists have found glycine in the coma of comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko, for instance, and at comet Wild-2. It’s not one of the essential amino acids because it can be synthesized in the human body. Out of the approximately 500 known amino acids, glycine is the simplest of them and is one of the 20 amino acids in the genetic code.

Amino acids are the building blocks of