A Million Beginnings

In a find that could open new avenues of inquiry in origin of life research, a new chemical snapshot of the Murchison meteorite, one of the world's most studied, suggests it contains millions of organic compounds (Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. USA, DOI: 10.1073/pnas.0912157107).

The Murchison meteorite plummeted to Earth in 1969, and its minimal exposure to earthly contaminants appeals to scientists seeking clues about how molecules delivered by meteorites could have sparked early life. Previous investigations of the meteorite have been targeted to specific compounds, such as amino acids. Now, a team led by Philippe Schmitt-Kopplin at the Helmholtz Center's Institute of Ecological Chemistry, in Germany, used metabolomics expertise to conduct a nontargeted search. With ultrahigh resolution mass spectrometry and NMR, the team identified signals representing over 14,000 elemental compositions, which they estimate equates to millions of compounds. "I was amazed by the complexity," Schmitt-Kopplin says.

The new work shows there's no shortage of molecules on the meteorite that origin-of-life researchers could investigate, says Jeffrey L. Bada, a cosmogeochemist at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography. "The challenge now is to fish out ones that may have some important early biochemical role."