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Peptides Survive Harsh Acid in Venus Clouds, Raising Hope for Extraterrestrial Life
Confirmed
In Short: Peptides, crucial building blocks of life, have been found to survive and even fold into biologically useful shapes in the highly acidic clouds of Venus, challenging previous assumptions about the planet's inhospitable conditions.
Peptides, short chains of amino acids, have been discovered to not only survive but also maintain stable 3D conformations in highly concentrated sulfuric acid, conditions similar to those found in Venus's clouds. This finding, according to researchers from MIT, could have significant implications for the search for biomolecules in Venus's acidic environment and beyond.
The stability of these peptides is surprising given the harsh conditions, with the absence of water at a 98 percent acid concentration playing a key role in their resilience. This discovery challenges the longstanding belief that Venus is too hostile for even the most resilient forms of life.
In the years since detecting phosphine signals in Venusian clouds, researchers have been investigating the survival of the building blocks of life, including peptides, in highly acidic environments. Their findings suggest that a new theoretical kind of extraterrestrial life could potentially thrive in the clouds of Venus.
These results, published in a recent study, indicate that Venus's clouds might not be as inhospitable as previously thought, opening up new possibilities for the search for life in the solar system and beyond. The implications of this research could lead to a rethinking of the conditions necessary for life to exist.
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- Hydrolysis is limited in nearly water-free acidic solutions like those in the clouds on Venus The latest chemistry news, including important research advances, business and policy trends, chemical safety practices, career guidance, and more.
- Despite longstanding conceptions that Venus would be too deadly for even the hardiest of extremophiles, new evidence suggests a rethinking of life from the ground up may be in order.
- “If peptides find their way to that cloud layer of concentrated sulfuric acid, they will stay and be stably preserved in that cloud of droplets,” said senior co-author Mei Hong, an MIT professor of chemistry and one of the senior authors of the new study.
- “Without water, an acid that you would consider a harsh solvent suddenly is not as menacing as one might think,” Hong said.
- Additionally, the sulfuric acid molecules acted as scaffolds, allowing biologically useful shapes to form that otherwise wouldn’t, such as omega loops, which are found in some naturally occurring proteins on Earth but not typically in peptides.
- See Also Artifacts on Mars Could Help Track Humanity’s Expansion into Space Similar to Earthly Archaeology, Researchers Say “What hadn’t been known is that peptides can survive so well and have specific three-dimensional shapes in an acidic environment,” Hong explained.
- Their existing work shows that a single PNA strand is stable in sulfuric acid, but the new research will attempt to recreate DNA’s double-strand structure with peptides.