A team of Japanese researchers has announced that they have managed to recreate the conditions from which life itself may have sprung, Reuters reports, quoting a report.

In a major breakthrough in the never-ending debate about 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.

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

Writing in the journal Science, Matsuno described how his team simulated a process called polymerisation, 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.

The chemical products, synthesised in hot hydrothermal vents in the sea, 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 more complex oligopeptide molecules in a stepwise process.

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