In addition to carbon and hydrogen, toxic cyanide may play an important role in the formation of the building blocks of life, according to new research by scientists.
Throughout history, cyanide has earned a well-deserved reputation as an extremely dangerous poison. Its use as a biological weapon has a wide range from both World Wars to the Franco-Prussian war in the late 1800s.
But in a paper published in the journal Nature, a team of chemists suggests that in addition to killing humans, cyanide may have helped life evolve from the beginning of Earth about 4 billion years ago.
Of course, the world looked very different back then. For example, the oxygen we breathe did not yet exist. “Cyanide is toxic to the kind of biology we’re working with today,” says Ramanarayan Krishnamurthy, a chemist at the Scripps Research Institute in California and lead author of the study. “But it may not be toxic if biology knows how to deal with it.”
Researchers brought together a group of molecules found mainly in early Earth in a laboratory and added cyanide to this mixture.
Ironically, these hazardous substances helped synthesize the simplest components of life under mild reaction conditions and with relatively few steps. Everything was surprisingly simple. “Sometimes it scares you when it’s that simple,” Krishnamurthy says. “We had it checked by three or four different people to make sure we got it right.”
The team says this unique mechanism marks the “first demonstration” of this biological pathway to the roots of life, and is much simpler than its widely accepted, non-toxic alternative, requiring extreme reaction conditions, complex steps and a touch of confidence. .
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