Major Breakthrough On Origins of Life on Earth: Did Magnetism Cause Chirality?

a wonderful person this is Anton and when it comes to the origin of life on a planet there are plenty of different Mysteries and plenty of questions that cannot be explained even today but today we're going to be discussing this one mystery that's maybe not as well known and the Mystery that's still completely unresolved something that we've known about for almost 200 years and something that affects all life on planet Earth but something that could potentially be somewhat cosmological in nature but in order for me to explain exactly what we're talking about and to basically then talk about the new study here I have to start with the really important part of history and a very well known Frenchman that most of us already know the microbiologist Louis Pasteur who's technically known as the father of microbiology and whose name is associated with a lot of different things I mean one of them is obviously pasteurized milk but back in 1848 he discovered a very a neural phenomenon that he could not explain right away here he was studying what's known as tartaric acid and this is actually something you can usually find in Graves and in his case in wine I mean his French after all now because he was also good at chemistry he was able to synthesize some of the tartaric acid instead of extracting it from for example grapes Now by itself this was already a pretty big achievement but what he actually realized when he looked at it through various microscopes and by applying polarized light is that for some reason both Solutions despite being tartaric acid were producing entirely different Optical observations now the synthesized version was not producing any specific effects and was for the most part neutral but the acid that was extracted from the grapes ended up shifting polarized light by just a little bit suggesting that the actual solution from the grapes and the solution produced in a lab was not the same it is synthesized and the natural solutions were producing different Optical observations but in order to figure out what's actually happening here he then decided to crystallize these liquids to see if they're going to produce the same crystals MD obviously didn't they produced something that was a little bit different and something that possessed different effects eventually he realized that he discovered something that we never knew about various organic molecules that today we refer to as chirality some molecules of tartaric acid were left-handed but some were right-handed today more commonly referred to as dextro and level in organic chemistry but more importantly what he actually discovered was the biggest mystery of biology the synthetic liquid that he created contained both left-handed and right-handed liquids in equal amounts kind of makes sense but the ones he extracted from grapes and other stuff were basically all right-handed the synthetic acid had two different crystals but the acid from grapes only had one and apparently at this point this was his Eureka moment he exclaimed Universe he discovered that life for some reason had a huge preference for chirality or for the handedness of molecules now in case you've never heard of this before chirality or handedness applies to most of the complex molecules that can be constructed in three dimensions so basically here you can produce the same chemical formula but the actual molecules are going to be different there are mirror images of each other and because of this they actually do not have the same effects moreover it turns out that all sugars on planet Earth are right-handed whereas all amino acids on planet Earth are left-handed and they cannot be exchanged for one another because they will not have the same effects and this biological chirality for about 180 years now has sort of remained as one of the biggest mysteries one of the strangest properties of Life on planet Earth that really doesn't make sense especially because except for one exception with bacteria no life on the planet can use left-handed sugars surprisingly there is only some types of ancient bacteria known to us that can physically change left-handed glucose into right-handed glucose in order to be absorbed later on but they cannot digest left-handed glucose no matter what which also naturally raises a lot of questions so can other handed life Exist Elsewhere can we actually have RNA in DNA that's entirely right-handed creating an entirely different type of life that's technically mirror image of us and the answer to that is yes we just don't know if it can exist on Planet Earth and it's probably not going to survive here for one simple reason it's going to have nothing to eat it cannot use any resources produced by life on Earth because we are basically left-handed or our DNA and RNA are left-handed and our sugars are right-handed okay I know it's a bit tricky and confusing but that's basically how it is and so even though both left-handed and right-handed sugars can exist in nature and are often created as both types only right-handed sugars are used by life and there's even evidence for chiral organic molecules in outer space in various nebula although it's not clear which ones are more common but for practically 200 years now the scientists have been trying to solve this and there are several sources for a potential solution one of them is actually outside of planet Earth by using organic samples collected from ancient asteroids it could be possible to determine what sort of chirality is prominent here as well one of the future studies of the samples from asteroid Bano is going to be resolved in one of these mysteries in the next few years we don't really have the results yet but they're coming soon but the other way is by conducting various experiments here on planet Earth and trying to recreate this in a lab so basically can we actually create conditions where certain chirality takes precedence and various experiments have been conducted in the past but one conducted there recently and so so far here some of the potential explanations the first one is I guess more or less simple it could be an accident maybe sometime in the past one of the molecules became more prominent and eventually became used by most of the life that was developing either one kind of disappeared and though it's a simple explanation it does kind of make sense the other explanations actually rely on something from outer space or on various physical elements that were present on early Earth for example in some experiments scientists were able to show that polarized UV light coming from the Sun can increase the destruction of one type of a molecule compared to the other one resulting in for example more right-handed compared to left-handed molecules likewise certain studies suggested that by being in a certain location in a certain nebula when the planets were just forming it's possible that activity from very powerful Stars resulted in huge amounts of radiation that would then destroy certain molecules which would actually imply that there are probably several stars with several planets that all came from the same nebular Cloud that all probably possess this right-handed or left-handed conditions likewise a study from 2020 that we've actually discussed previously with a video in the description suggested that cosmic rays and specifically neurons are often magnetically polarized in such a way that they're going to actually show a little bit more preference for the electrons from for example right-handed molecules compared to left-handed which would increase overall interaction and also mutation as well as destruction of potential DNA so basically in this case the cosmic radiation itself could preferentially affect right-headed molecules as opposed to left-handed although other Studies have also proposed this to be neutrinos and not cosmic rays so these are obviously more hypothetical and this would be very difficult to prove but they still kind of make sense but now we have a new proposition that's actually a little bit more exciting than the ones previously and this one involves a natural experiment that even shows the creation of only right-handed molecules as always the study in the description here it involves what's known as ribo Amino oxazolin also known as Rao this is a very important precursor to RNA and is also either left-handed or right-handed specifically it ends up producing cytosine or uracil but like so many other sugars it can also produce crystallized particles and can thus be studied a lot easier and just like previously with Pasteur's experiments it produces either right-handed or left-handed crystals although in this case unlike previous crystals used this one we know is needed for life but only in one type can be successfully used by life to produce RNA molecules and so intriguing the scientists in this case were able to grow very specific crystals by placing them on magnetite and when placed on magnetized surfaces for some reason the crystallization of this molecule was always 100 percent producing left-handed amino acid the one needed for life but they also were able to then produce opposite molecules also with 100 success by essentially changing the spin alignment or magnetization of the active surface with the main implication here being that all of this could have been because of magnetic particles that were present all over the surface of early Earth as a matter of fact magnetite is often correlated with the existence of early life on the planet with the main implication being that life might have a preference for handedness because of magnetite and magnetic minerals in primordial times although in frequently the scientists suggest that none of this seems to work in liquid muddy conditions but seems to mostly work on a rocket surface containing solid magnetite nevertheless here the discovery is really exciting it produces an experiment that's easy to replicate that creates chiral organic molecules using very similar conditions to primordial Earth which by itself is already quite groundbreaking but is obviously just the first step in trying to figure this out as a matter of fact we've actually discussed previous experiments that try to create synthetic life on the planet using various sources from bacteria and here it would be interesting to find out if someone could potentially create synthetic life that's entirely mirror to a typical life we find here and then it would be interesting to see what it's actually going to do now the expectation here is that it's probably not going to survive it needs to consume mirrored food it also needs to have all its sugars in Mirror format as well but on the other hand it's unlikely to be affected by viruses which would not be able to connect to it and so what exactly the synthetic mirror wife would do on Earth would be a very interesting question to answer although internally some studies even proposed that maybe if such life actually occurs on the planet it could completely take over everything mostly because this bacteria if it found some kind of a food source for example algae that can actually use sunlight would suddenly find itself without absolutely any Predators or any enemies nothing could consume it nothing would want to eat it which could potentially lead to Major disturbance of the food chain and though it does make a pretty cool science fiction story that probably has been explored many times including in Star Trek and more recently in the Fantastic Four so this is definitely a concept that has been explored previously and scientists have thought about before but it's not a concept that we still understand very well but more interestingly when it comes to astrobiology the scientists would love to find out as human as life exists out there is life actually mirror anywhere else or is it always going to have same handedness as life on planet Earth and if so why but we'll explore this in some of the future videos on that note check out the study in the description below thank you for watching subscribe share this with someone who has learned about space and Sciences come back tomorrow to learn something else and maybe superlation on patreon by Julian Cinema bishop or by buying a wonderful person t-shirt you can find in the description stay wonderful see you tomorrow and as always bye [Music] thank you [Music] foreign

Channel: Anton Petrov

Views: 247,256

Keywords: chirality, handedness, left handed molecules, right handed molecules, rna, origin of life, how did life start on earth, anton petrov, science, physics, astrophysics, astronomy, universe, whatdamath, what da math, technology, early earth, creation of life, life on earth, dna molecule, chiral puzzle of life, organic chemistry, what is handedness, mutation of dna, dna mutation, why is dna right handed, dna chirality, cosmic rays, cosmic rays and dna, muons, fermi paradox

Id: ZuH3ETVjAUY

Length: 13min 40sec (820 seconds)

Published: Wed Jul 05 2023