Mar. 13 – The prestigious scientific journal “Nature Communications” has published an all-Italian study. The research was carried out by Tommaso Fraccia, Giuliano Zanchetta, Elvezia Paraboschi and Tommaso Bellini from the Biometrics Department of the Statale di Milano, in collaboration with Boulder University, Colorado (USA). The topic is the “spontaneous” order of primordial DNA, a study on the origins of life, based on the little clues that emerge from geological and biological data. The study on ancient mineral formations highlighted the presence of chemical processes brought about by elementary forms of life, presumably similar to bacteria, from 3.5 to 3.8 billion years ago, half a billion years after the stabilization of the earth’s crust. What could have preceded the formation of these unicellular organisms is difficult to determine. The study demonstrates that the spontaneous self-assembly properties of DNA fragments have the ability to drive the formation of chemical bonds and thus promote the formation of long chains of DNA without the aid of biological mechanisms. This observation suggests what may have happened during the first days of the Earth, when the first biomolecules formed. (Red)
