![]() ![]() She points to the conflicting Viking experiments on Mars in the 1970s, when a lander found some support for metabolizing microbes but no evidence for organic molecules, as a prime example. She praises Benner's work targeting long, charged molecules as a great starting point but urges an even more open-minded approach that focuses on more general anomalies - phenomena that resist simple physical or biological characterization. But Carol Cleland, a philosopher and the director of the Center for the Study of Origins at the University of Colorado Boulder, worries that any search based on checking rigid boxes is doomed to have blind spots. Buried in Benner's criteria for a genetic molecule lies an implicit definition of life: a structure that evolves. Other researchers involved in the astrobiology community, however, wonder if even these out-of-the-box approaches don't go far enough. And both Bywaters and Bramall feel optimistic about their devices, expecting that they'll be ready to fly before the end of the decade. "It's going to be a suite of instruments looking for multiple different smoking guns."ĭevelopment of any single device may stall, but these two projects represent small bets in NASA's growing astrobiology portfolio, as the agency prepares for more ambitious missions to Mars and distant moons. "I don't think any one life-detection instrument will be the end all be all," she says. This type of "nanopore" experiment could complement Benner's universal life-detection machine, according to Kathryn Bywaters, a SETI scientist working at NASA Ames. In 2018 NASA awarded Pennsylvania-based nanotechnology start-up Goeppert a $125,000 grant to develop a device that can analyze the size and shape of potential biomolecules as they pass through a nanometer-size pore. ![]() They dubbed it hachimoji DNA, meaning "eight letters" in Japanese.Īnd the lunchbox is just one of the life-detection projects aiming to catch a ride to another world. ![]() In the new research, his group announced the construction of an eight-molecule system capable of storing, copying and editing information. Up to 12 letters are possible on paper, though, and Benner has spent three decades (during two of which he received NASA funding totaling nearly $5 million) realizing some of them in the lab. This system enables evolution by being reliable enough to safeguard those instructions between generations while maintaining the flexibility for occasional revisions.īut does the alphabet of life have to contain four letters? Some have argued yes - four elements strike the perfect balance between fitting in more information and a lower risk of typos. They store instructions for producing copies of themselves in their DNA - another long string, but one assembled from four molecules rather than two numbers. Netflix represents digital movies as long strings of 0's and 1's, and all known Earth organisms follow a similar strategy. The recent research, which was published in the journal Science, covered new ground regarding genetic information storage. "That drags scientists kicking and screaming across uncharted terrain." "You set these grand challenges to make a new Darwinian system," says Steven Benner, founder of the Foundation for Applied Molecular Evolution at the University of Florida and leader of the group. In 2019, for instance, a team of synthetic biologists showed that the four-molecule genetic code that describes all known life on Earth isn't the only group of molecules that could support evolution. The molecule's ingredients, called nucleotides, are four components coiled in a double helix called adenine, cytosine, guanine and thymine.īut as researchers debate which molecules to look for, recent work suggests casting a broader net. Personal Loans for 670 Credit Score or LowerĭNA is like a toolkit that stores and transmits vital information passed from a living organism to its offspring. Personal Loans for 580 Credit Score or Lower Best Debt Consolidation Loans for Bad Credit
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