[HN Gopher] Japan asteroid probe finds 23 amino acids, researche...
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Japan asteroid probe finds 23 amino acids, researchers confirm
Author : weare138
Score : 266 points
Date : 2022-06-14 11:04 UTC (11 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (asia.nikkei.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (asia.nikkei.com)
| mrfusion wrote:
| How many of these are essential amino acids though?
| formvoltron wrote:
| Japanese find 23 amino acids on space rock, after sneezing on
| space rock.
| sam-2727 wrote:
| Anyone have a link to the source journal article? I can't find
| it.
| y1zhou wrote:
| Closest paper I could find is
| https://doi.org/10.1126/science.abn7850, but it made no
| mentions to amino acids in the main text or the supplement.
| belter wrote:
| https://www.hou.usra.edu/meetings/lpsc2022/pdf/1781.pdf
| 8bitsrule wrote:
| Seems it was published in _Proceedings of the Japan Academy,
| Series B._ , and the one in Science is 'a separate study'.
|
| Found this abstract:
| https://www.jstage.jst.go.jp/article/pjab/98/6/98_PJA9806B-0...
| swader999 wrote:
| So can we eat these?
| harveywi wrote:
| Yes. A robotic space lasso can be used to herd the asteroids in
| low earth orbit. Next they are ground into a powder, packaged
| with little parachutes, and yeeted directly to consumers.
| minsc_and_boo wrote:
| You could just smash the asteroids into the ground w/o
| parachutes, saves money on the pulverization steps. Same day
| shipping.
| adrian_mrd wrote:
| Soylent Space... it's from asteroids, people!
| SketchySeaBeast wrote:
| We're all just stardust, with much of it in our colon.
| criley2 wrote:
| It included glutamic acid so all we need to do is refine it to
| the salt version and bam, space msg
| lovemenot wrote:
| Mission sponsor: Ajinomoto
| pfdietz wrote:
| Some amino acids that are not normally produced in living
| systems are neurotoxic, so I wouldn't if I were you.
|
| https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/27677549/
| vixen99 wrote:
| No but I think HarveyWi might try them on our behalf.
| [deleted]
| garblegarble wrote:
| Is the article suggesting that they think these amino acids have
| survived in space for (over) 4.6 billion years? That's
| astonishing, I'd have thought that over that stretch of time the
| background radiation would have broken the atomic bonds
| adrian_b wrote:
| The organic substances can survive billions of years in most
| meteoroids or asteroids, due to the extremely low temperature.
| They are perfectly frozen.
|
| Most of the ambient radiation is absorbed close to the surface,
| so the organic substances that are buried even a few mm will
| not be affected.
| ezconnect wrote:
| Does it mean some of them are lost due to extraction and
| before testing for them?
| PaulHoule wrote:
| They cooked a sample of Ryuguu and drove off about 15% of its
| mass, mostly in the form of H2O and CO2. That is, Ryuguu is
| wetter and more carbon rich than the earth.
|
| Iron, Silicon and Aluminum are there in abundance. (Gerard K.
| O'Neill and many science fiction writers have gotten wrong the
| idea that you need M-type asteroids to get iron.) Astronauts
| found high quality hematite ore on the moon.
|
| If you wanted to make large solar sails (say to be a sunshade the
| Earth-Sun L1 point) you would probably de-volatilize materials by
| using heat and possibly oxygen. It would be ideal to convert
| hydrocarbons to carbon monoxide so you can do C1 chemistry to
| make plastics. You have waste CO2 no matter what (it offgases
| from carbonates and other chemistry) so you will need the same
| kind of chemistry people are talking about for capturing CO2 and
| using it as a chemical feedstock.
|
| The "metal line" and "stone lines" would reduce the devolatized
| rock to produce silicon solar cells, electric connections,
| mirrors, etc. You will make storage tanks from iron, the
| devolatilization process could be a little awkward because you
| will need storage tanks to put the gate.
|
| The one resource I'm not sure about is nitrogen, which is
| important for making chemistry work. (Say you want to make a sail
| out of Kapton instead of Polyethylene.)
| samatman wrote:
| > _The one resource I 'm not sure about is nitrogen_
|
| Good news! Nitrogen is the amine in amino acid.
|
| Nitrogen is likely to be a limiting reagent in a lot of
| interesting processes in space, finding amino acids is good
| news but it's not clear how much nitrogen we're talking about.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| In _Gundam_ the O 'Neill colonies are less plausible than the
| giant robots because the huge airspaces require large amounts
| of inert gases such as nitrogen, argon, helium, or SF6. I
| find it profoundly annoying that phys.org publishes a story
| every week or so about how lunar colonists could make oxygen
| for 'breathing' which is a way to burn out and not fade away
| unless you have four parts of some other gas.
| worker_person wrote:
| Large fans? Or if they are spinning, wouldn't air tend to
| want to stay in place while the ground moves, causing a
| breeze?
|
| Ir maybe the Newtype are people that evolved to thrive in
| oxygen rich environment. :)
| harveywi wrote:
| I wonder if this can be used as a meatless protein source.
| Sharlin wrote:
| What? Amino acids from asteroids? At a sweet, sweet price of
| trillions of EUR$PS per gram? That's gonna be one expensive
| burger. These are just bunches of CHNO atoms. We can synthetize
| them in any biochem lab easily enough.
| themodelplumber wrote:
| I wouldn't be surprised if a namesake health product hits
| Japanese markets at least. Drink "Amino-purobbu", space de
| mitsukatta 23 amino acids iri!
|
| Actually I would totally try it.
| ajross wrote:
| Probably, yes, in exactly the same way (though with
| significantly less nutritive value) that fill dirt or
| construction rubble can be used as a meatless protein source.
| throwaway0x7E6 wrote:
| gus_massa wrote:
| Short answer: No
|
| Long answer:
|
| Ignoring the cost ...
|
| Each amino acid has two mirrored versions. We use only one of
| them, so one half will be wasted.
|
| Of the half we use, we don't use all of them, we use like
| 20+something. Some of the others may be transformed into one of
| the amino acids we use, but it looks like the found many weird
| amino acids, so a big chunk will be wasted.
|
| Also, some amino acids are more useful and we can't produce
| some of them, so any mix is not equivalent. A mix produced by
| blending a cow is more similar to our preferred mix than a mix
| produced blending plants. The mix in the asteroid is even
| worse.
|
| Bacteria can feed from more strange amino acids, so the
| bacteria in your guts will be happy and you will produce farts
| no man has smelt before. [Actually the smell depends on how
| much sulfur the amino acids have. I'm not sure in this case
| Anyway, expect diarrhea and other nasty stuff.]
|
| Some of the weird amino acids may even be toxic, but let's be
| optimistic.
|
| So, it looks like a bad idea.
| Barrera wrote:
| > A total of 23 types of amino acids were found in asteroid
| samples brought back by Japan's Hayabusa2 space probe, according
| to new studies published in the journal Science and elsewhere,
| shedding further light on the origins of life on Earth.
|
| This intersects with a raging debate in Origins of Life research.
| The Miller-Urey experiment demonstrated the production of amino
| acids from simple gasses thought the be present in the early
| Earth atmosphere and energy.
|
| The problem is that you can add amino acids into a flask, stir,
| and not much will happen. You can pump in all the energy you want
| and all you'll get it tar. Before you can even start to make
| proteins, which is what makes life, you need enzymes. The trouble
| with enzymes is that they're, well, proteins.
|
| So how do you get the proteins that make proteins in the first
| place?
|
| One line of investigation says that you don't. What happens
| instead are stepping-stone chemical processes that turn energy
| from the environment into self-reinforcing cycles that build
| complex molecules. Over time chemical evolution takes place to
| produce self-reinforcing systems that make something that's very
| close to amino acids and/or proteins. We don't know what these
| processes are, but we can deduce their necessity given the above
| conundrum. Chemical evolution is a process we observe on the
| macro scale when, for example, viruses evade vaccine defenses.
|
| In other words, finding amino acids just says that the processes
| that produce amino acids are ubiquitous. This is hardly
| surprising given the molecular simplicity at play. There's just a
| handful of atoms and they pop together following well-understood
| rules. The paths to making amino acids from simpler inputs is
| short, well-defined, and not entropically disfavored. It can (and
| does) occur abiotically.
|
| Finding enzymes or other complex proteins above statistical
| background levels on the other hand would be different. That
| would be a world-changing find because it would be strong
| evidence of previous life. Even more, you'd be hard-pressed to
| find any other explanation.
|
| But it's not just proteins. _Any_ sufficiently complex molecule
| found above expected statistical levels due to random reactions
| would be strong evidence supporting previous life.
|
| As an aside, finding _enantiomerically-enriched_ amino acids
| would also be an important finding for similar reasons. The
| article doesn 't discuss this, though.
|
| For a high-level overview of what all of this about, check out
| Lex Fiedman's interview with Lee Cronin:
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZecQ64l-gKM
| fpoling wrote:
| Self-replicating proteins can happen by a chance. And if the
| chance is too small for the life to happen accidentally in the
| known universe, then this is an argument that there are more
| than we can see or there were many universes in past.
| pfdietz wrote:
| The simplest self-replicating system we know of that exists
| in some natural environment (not, say, in a carefully
| purified solution of energetic monomers) has billions of
| atoms. And self-reproducing proteins have never, to my
| knowledge, ever been demonstrated in any experiment.
| lovemenot wrote:
| I wonder whether having a better understanding of the
| mechanism of prion replication might help illuminate
| possible pathways to the emergence of life.
| fpoling wrote:
| If it turned out that going from amino acid to DNA/protein
| life is only possible by chance, then this an argument that
| there were at least 1e1000000 or whatever number past
| universes to allow to produce life.
| gus_massa wrote:
| I agree that the step from simple molecules like amino acids to
| life is far from clear. A nice candidate is the RNA, because it
| can have enzymatic properties and also store information and
| somewhat self copy. More details in
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RNA_world
| adrian_b wrote:
| The number of amino-acids found has been mentioned in many on-
| line media, but it is completely meaningless.
|
| There exists a huge number of amino-acids, most of them are not
| made or used by the known living beings and of those made by
| living beings even fewer are used in proteins.
|
| A very large number of random amino-acids have also been found in
| various meteorites, because they easily form from the most
| abundant chemical elements in the Universe, H, C, N and O,
| whenever there is not enough oxygen to oxidize everything else,
| but among them only about 10 of those used by living beings have
| been found, i.e. about one half of the amino-acids used in
| proteins.
|
| What would have been interesting to know about the Japanese
| asteroid probe would have been if, among the many amino-acids
| found, there have been also the same about 10 amino-acids
| previously found, or only a part of them, and if there has been
| found any other amino-acid with biological importance besides
| those ten.
|
| The press release mentions only glutamic acid and valine, 2
| simple amino-acids which belong to those 10 about which it is
| well known that they can easily be synthesized in abiotic
| conditions.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _press release mentions only glutamic acid and valine, 2
| simple amino-acids which belong to those 10_
|
| "Proteinogenic amino acids such as glycine, D,L-a- alanine as
| well as non-proteinogenic amino acids including b-alanine,
| D,L-a-aminobutyric acid were identified. The chiral amino acids
| are present as racemic mixtures (D/L ~ 1), which is indicative
| of extraterrestrial, non-biological origins."
|
| https://www.hou.usra.edu/meetings/lpsc2022/pdf/1781.pdf
| adrian_b wrote:
| Thanks for the link.
|
| This is an earlier report about the progress of the chemical
| analysis of the asteroid samples, at a time when they had
| identified only 10 amino-acids and when they had not
| identified yet the glutamic acid and the valine.
|
| Unlike in the news report, here the relevant information is
| present.
|
| However the results do not contain any surprise. As expected,
| there are equal quantities of left-handed and right-handed
| amino-acids (unlike in living beings) and all the amino-acids
| are among those simple enough to be synthesized
| spontaneously, in the absence of life.
| NotSammyHagar wrote:
| Building on that, it's ever more clear that the needed building
| blocks needed to create life are floating around in space, they
| seem to be very common. Wherever there are adequate conditions
| (water can exist in liquid form, not too harsh of an
| environment), amino acids will be deposited there from meteors,
| they could chemically interact and over lots of time more
| complex things can arise. So there's an excellent change for
| some kind of life (microbes at least) to be widely being
| created across the universe.
| pfdietz wrote:
| > So there's an excellent [chance] for some kind of life
| (microbes at least) to be widely being created across the
| universe.
|
| What a whopper of a non sequitur. This conclusion does not
| follow at all from the evidence.
| rndmind wrote:
| > More than 500 naturally occurring amino acids are known
| [..exist], although only 22 appear in the genetic code.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amino_acid
|
| So, the article doesn't list which amino acids were found,
| except one, glutamic acid. The real question is, which amino
| acids were found.
| april_22 wrote:
| Is there the possibility that these amino acids appeared on
| the asteroid after it landed on earth/during entry through
| the athmosphere?
| driggs wrote:
| Hayabusa2 rendezvoused with the asteroid in space
| ("asteroid", not "meteorite"). The asteroid never entered
| Earth atmosphere.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hayabusa2
| stevenjgarner wrote:
| > There exists a huge number of amino-acids, most of them are
| not made or used by the known living beings and of those made
| by living beings even fewer are used in proteins.
|
| Thanks for the clarification, I did not know this. "Roughly 500
| amino acids have been identified in nature, but just 20 amino
| acids make up the proteins found in the human body."
|
| > but among them only about 10 of those used by living beings
| have been found, i.e. about one half of the amino-acids used in
| proteins.
|
| So you are in fact underscoring just how significant this
| finding is by Japan on just one out of more than "between 1.1
| and 1.9 million asteroids larger than 1 kilometer (0.6 miles)
| in diameter" in the asteroid belt [2]
|
| [1] https://www.ajinomoto.com/aboutus/amino-acids/20-amino-
| acids
|
| [2] https://solarsystem.nasa.gov/asteroids-comets-and-
| meteors/as...
| bigbillheck wrote:
| > "Roughly 500 amino acids have been identified in nature,
| but just 20 amino acids make up the proteins found in the
| human body."
|
| There are 20 used to assemble human proteins, but thanks to
| post-translational modifications there are lot more than that
| in the actual proteins.
| gilleain wrote:
| There is also selenocysteine, which is cys with the sulfur
| replaced by selenium.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Selenocysteine
|
| It's not present in all organisms, but where it is, it is
| incorporated in proteins during translation, not after.
| adrian_b wrote:
| The returning of the asteroid sample and its analysis by
| Japan are very important and interesting.
|
| The problem is with the news report, which does not include
| the information that could have been interesting about the
| results. Instead of that, the news report stresses the number
| of amino-acids that happened to be found in the sample, which
| has an extremely low importance.
|
| Any extraterrestrial sample of matter which has condensed
| from a gas with the oxygen content under a certain threshold,
| and which has not been exposed to high temperatures that
| would vaporize the volatile organic substances is guaranteed
| to contain many amino-acids. Confirming the expectations is
| not newsworthy.
|
| If the news report would have contained the list of amino-
| acids, or better, also their proportions, that could have
| contained some useful information.
|
| A complete list might be too much in a news report for the
| general public, but there is some useful condensed
| information that could have been given instead of a complete
| list, i.e. how many proteinogenic amino-acids were among the
| 23, how many of the amino-acids were left-handed and how many
| right-handed, and whether there was any amino-acid which has
| not been found previously in matter of abiotic origin.
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