All life on earth may have started in sea spray, new discovery finds

Us humans have been knocking about for around 300,000 years, but we’re still not entirely sure how we got here.

Exactly how molecules and amino acids gave way to life has long perplexed scientists. Your boy Charles Darwin reckoned chemicals bonded in ‘warm little ponds’ while others suggested chemical reactions triggered by lightning strikes are to thank for our being here.

New research suggests Darwin was onto something with the whole warm water thing, saying ‘rapid’ reactions can take place when water meets air.

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The Telegraph reports that Purdue University experts have suggested sea spray could be where life started.

When water droplets in spray collide with air, amino acids can be transformed into peptides, which are the ‘precursors’ of the proteins that eventually evolve to form living cells. 

Professor Graham Cooks of Purdue’s College of Science explained: “This is essentially the chemistry behind the origin of life.”

He added: “This is the first demonstration that primordial molecules, simple amino acids, spontaneously form peptides, the building blocks of life, in droplets of pure water. This is a dramatic discovery.”  

While it’s always been thought that life first evolved in oceans, what puzzled scientists was how amino acids locked together to form the proteins needed for life.

To do this, amino acids had to lose a water molecule. It won’t come as much of a surprise to hear that this tends to be rather tricky in water. 

That’s why scientists are so optimistic about the whole sea spray thing: when air and water meet, water molecules can be ditched.

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Chemists have spent over ten years studying chemical reactions in droplets containing water using mass spectrometers.

Of the discovery - shared in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) - Cooks added: “The rates of reactions in droplets are anywhere from a hundred to a million times faster than the same chemicals reacting in bulk solution.”

He went on: “If you walk through an academic campus at night, the buildings with the lights on are where synthetic chemists are working.

“Their experiments are so slow they run for days or weeks at a time. This isn't necessary.

“Using droplet chemistry, we have built an apparatus, which is being used at Purdue now, to speed up the synthesis of novel chemicals and potential new drugs.”