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Meteor molecules mirror those on Earth

Posted on March 02, 2008

The work is being published in this week s Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS). The paper is titled, Molecular asymmetry in extraterrestrial chemistry: Insights from a pristine meteorite, and is co-authored by Pizzarello and Yongsong Huang and Marcelo Alexandre, of Brown University. When scientists synthesize these molecules in the laboratory, half of a sample turns out to be left-handed and the other half right-handed. But amino acids, which are the building blocks of terrestrial proteins, are all left-handed, while the sugars of DNA and RNA are ...

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