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kg4jxt t1_ir04t3r wrote

These scientists are about 60 years late to the party. In the 1950s, Harold Urey and Stanley Miller experimented with the formation of amino acids from primordial atmosphere gases (ammonia, methane, and water). Subsequent "Miller experiment" work into the early 1960s extended this study to the formation of peptides and nucleic acids. I read about such experiments in books by Isaac Asimov when I was a kid and actually replicated such an experiment in a HIGH SCHOOL chemistry lab!

The statement in this article attributed to "Graham Cooks . . . the Henry Bohn Hass Distinguished Professor of Analytical Chemistry in Purdue’s College of Science, [that] 'This is the first demonstration that primordial molecules, simple amino acids, spontaneously form peptides'" is false.

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ZoomedAndDoomed t1_ir082t9 wrote

You misquoted it, the original quote is "This is the first demonstration that primordial molecules, simple amino acids, spontaneously form peptides, the building blocks of life, in droplets of pure water. This is a dramatic discovery." The Miller experiment wasn't the first to discover them in droplets of pure water, miller was the first to discover that primordial molecules, simple amino acids, spontaneously form peptides.

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kg4jxt t1_ir4vaxr wrote

Are you making the distinction that the process occurred experimentally in "droplets of pure water"? First of all, by any definition the water in Miller-type experiments is not pure: it contains a mixture of gases. Second, peptides could never form in pure water for the same reason; pure water does not contain the elements necessary to construct amino acids. So the "in pure water" phrase is a bit of mumbo jumbo some creative writer at scitechdaily probably threw in there, not relevant to the quote, imho. I doubt it appears in an original publication on this work.

I have read (many years ago), that although amino acids form readily enough from ammonia and methane as precursors; getting more complex molecules was ever more hit-and-miss in these types of experiments. Partly this was thought to be due to the relatively small quantities of amino acids in the apparatus from the first-stage syntheses. So some modified experiments began with added amino acids to simulate hypothesized concentration effects, and/or adding clay or other substrate that might act to catalyze formation of more complex molecules. I do not have access to journal libraries, so I can't find better than https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/26508401/ (which does not mention peptide formation).

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