This website uses cookies and similar technologies to provide services, analyze and improve performance, and provide personalized content and advertising. Information about your use of this website will be shared with Google and other third parties. Read our privacy policy.

Scientists have discovered that the Miller-Urey "primitive soup" experiment has been carried out in borosilicate flasks, which is a bit lucky because glass promotes the formation of amino acids, peptides and nucleobases.

In 1952, doctoral student Stanley Miller and doctoral supervisor Harold Urey conducted a classic experiment that would later become a scientist, trying to find out how simple compounds become molecules of life. The two designed a device designed to simulate conditions on Earth 4 billion years ago, combining water, methane, hydrogen and ammonia. Then, they created an artificial lightning storm in the flask, and an electric arc was created between the two electrodes.

What Miller and Yuri might not have imagined is that, as researchers in Spain and Italy have now discovered, glass flasks seem to be a key component of the reaction. They performed the reaction in an ordinary borosilicate glass reactor, a Teflon reactor, and a Teflon reactor containing borosilicate glass flakes in water.

Source: © Reuters/Alamy Stock Photo

Stanley Miller and the equipment in his famous experiment in 1952 simulated conditions thought to have been found on the early Earth. Recent studies have shown that glass reaction vessels play their own role in the chemical reactions that take place in them 

Only when run in glassware does the reaction produce a brown broth containing at least 52 organic compounds. In particular, dipeptides, certain amino acids, dicarboxylic acids, polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, and a set of biological nucleobases are more effective in glass containers or are formed only in glass containers-when glass fragments are added to a plastic flask, they are formed To a lesser extent. Although it is not clear exactly how glass promotes reactivity, it may be related to surface silanol groups and trace amounts of metal released from the glass into the solution.

In the decades since 1952, there has been evidence that the gas mixture used in the reaction may not represent the early atmosphere of the early Earth after all. Nevertheless, the Spanish-Italian team stated that Miller and Yuri may have unknowingly simulated the effects of rocks and minerals by reacting in a borosilicate flask. The origin is very important.

J Criado-Reyes et al., Sci. Representative, 2021, 11, 21009 (DOI: 10.1038/s41598-021-00235-4)

The laboratory has made great progress in the chemical system that simulates the behavior of life.

Using heavier hydrogen isotopes to reproduce the iconic Miller-Urey work will produce unexpected compounds 

Test tubes 50 years ago provide clues to the formation of peptide bonds and life on the early Earth

Institutions representing more than 1,000 universities want to guarantee UK participation in European research projects

If the industry is committed to technological change, a larger version of the rooftop refinery can meet the global demand for kerosene

A technology that sounds impossible, more environmentally friendly than you think

© Royal Society of Chemistry Registered Charity Number: 207890

Website powered by Webvision Cloud