Saturday, December 20, 2008

More Support for a Cold Origin of Life

Some of you may remember an article in Discover Magazine detailing several very interesting experiments which have guided researchers to believe that the origin of life happened in frigid temperatures. Now a new study has come along to support the hypothesis that life began in ice:

"It is generally believed that LUCA was a heat-loving or hyperthermophilic organism. A bit like one of those weird organisms living in the hot vents along the continental ridges deep in the oceans today (above 90 degrees Celsius)," says Nicolas Lartillot, the study's co-author and a bio-informatics professor at the Université de Montréal. "However, our data suggests that LUCA was actually sensitive to warmer temperatures and lived in a climate below 50 degrees."

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