NASA Researchers Discover the Origin of a Major Aspect of Creation of Life

Researchers analyzing meteorite fragments that fell on a frozen lake in Canada have developed an explanation for the origin of life's "handedness" – why living things only use molecules with specific orientations. The work also gave the strongest evidence to date that liquid water inside an asteroid leads to a strong preference of left-handed over right-handed forms of some common protein amino acids in meteorites. The result makes the search for extraterrestrial life more challenging.

"Our analysis of the amino acids in meteorite fragments from Tagish Lake gave us one possible explanation for why all known life uses only left-handed versions of amino acids to build proteins," said Dr. Daniel Glavin of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. Glavin is lead author of a paper on this research to be published in the journal Meteoritics and Planetary Science.
In January, 2000, a large meteoroid exploded in the atmosphere over northern British Columbia, Canada, and rained fragments across the frozen surface of Tagish Lake. Because many people witnessed the fireball, pieces were collected within days and kept preserved in their frozen state. This ensured that there was very little contamination from terrestrial life.

"The Tagish Lake meteorite continues to reveal more secrets about the early Solar System the more we investigate it," said Dr. Christopher Herd of the University of Alberta, Edmonton, Canada, a co-author on the paper who provided samples of the Tagish Lake meteorite for the team to analyze. "This latest study gives us a glimpse into the role that water percolating through asteroids must have played in making the left-handed amino acids that are so characteristic of all life on Earth."