Scientists re-create life’s sea cradle

By Elaine Lies

REUTERS

NAGAOKA, Japan, Feb. 5 — Huddled at the foot of soaring white peaks and buried deep in snow for months at a time, Nagaoka hardly looks like a place where scientific breakthroughs could occur. Yet here, on Friday, a team of Japanese researchers announced that they have managed to re-create the conditions from which life itself may have sprung.

IN A MAJOR breakthrough in the debate over how life started, Koichiro Matsuno and colleagues at the Nagaoka University of Technology built an artificial system simulating the environment at undersea thermal vents, where water heated deep below erupts through the seabed into cooler ocean water.

By this they were able to produce some of the elementary building blocks from which proteins, essential to life, are formed.

“Man has been asking ‘what is life’ for thousands of years. But the real question is where did life begin,” Matsuno told reporters.

“For 10 years, underwater hydrothermal vents have been thought to be the place where life began — and we were able to prove it.”

Writing in the journal Science, Matsuno described how his team simulated a process called polymerization, in which complex molecules — in this case oligopeptides, one of the elements that make up proteins — are formed from simpler amino acids.

This process was likely to be repeated numerous times, possibly aided by “heating in dry and wet conditions, day-and-night cycles, tidal waves (and) dry-wet conditions in lagoons,” the authors wrote.

“I asked myself where life originated and said, ‘Go down to the hydrothermal vents in the (primordial) sea,’” Matsuno said.

There, chemical products synthesized in hot vents could re-enter the vents after being quenched in the surrounding cold water and undergo further reactions.

Matsuno and his team built a flow reactor that mimicked the cooling and heating parts of the cycle.

The two-chambered flow reactor circulated materials from hot to cold environments in roughly one-minute cycles. When they added the amino acid glycine, they found that this formed into more complex oligopeptide molecules over a series of steps.

Key to the process was the addition of bivalent copper ions, one of many minerals present on the sea floor — an addition Matsuno said was serendipitous.

“I was at a conference with my good friend Andre Brack, a French researcher, and just as I was about to step on a bus, he said, ‘You really should consider bivalent ions.’ That was it.”

A native of Japan’s northernmost island of Hokkaido who attended the prestigious Tokyo University, Matsuno, 58, said he has wrestled with questions on the origins of life for more than three decades, since around the time he received his physics Ph.D. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

But inspiration for his current work came only two years ago.

“I had a lot of failures, and finally came up with this experimental design, basically because nothing else worked.”

The solution came just in time — the group was about ready to give up its research if this last attempt failed.

The flow reactor itself, a little over 3 feet (1 meter) in height, looks like something put together from spare parts in a garage.

Matsuno said its simplicity was probably why it succeeded.

“Our biggest problem before was making things too complicated in our thoughts.”

Nagaoka is 170 miles (270 kilometers) from Tokyo, the closest metropolitan area, and although the idea of cutting-edge research coming out of a remote university may be surprising, Matsuno and his colleagues said this works to their advantage.

More elite Japanese universities tend to be hierarchical.

Ei-ichi Imai, the researcher who built the flow reactor, said whenever he got stuck on a problem he could just go and casually ask some expert for advice.

“Here, you don’t have to spend so much time on other things and can think hard about your work.”