Everything we know and see until today was formed on a fireball-like rock a few billion years ago, and today’s life came to the world with countless evolutionary trees. But until now, scientists have not discovered the most fundamental factor at the root of these trees that makes life possible.
All research to date has mostly followed two different paths: doing retrospective research from today’s animals and plants (top-down) and examining the process back to the origins of life (bottom-up), when there was no life on Earth yet. But today, news of a new strategy was announced.
How life originated will be explored with a new strategy:
NASA’s Laurie Barge and her team have announced a new research strategy to bridge the gap between these two accepted research types in the scientific world – a field that will combine both methods: “Electron transport chains.”
This chain is one of the most basic structures for the transport of enzymes in living things, and thus is a major binding point for the history of evolution on Earth. A comprehensive understanding of this system can offer great clues about what to look for outside of Earth, as well as explaining how life first arose.
Of course, we will see if we can achieve success with this strategy, but by waiting. The result of new studies by scientists will reveal the success of the strategy.
So, what are the gaps in the two most applied methods?
The biggest gap of the two methods was included in the new strategy announcement. According to the team, although the top-down method shows the history of life, it can only trace genes that are also present in today’s creatures. The bottom-up method, on the other hand, shows how life might have come into existence through “prebiotic chemistry” experiments, but does not offer a definitive answer.
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