Bibcode
Colín-García, María; Kanawati, Basem; Harir, Mourad; Schmitt-Kopplin, Phillippe; Amils, Ricardo; Parro, Victor; García, Miriam; Fernández-Remolar, David
Bibliographical reference
Origins of Life and Evolution of Biospheres, Volume 41, Issue 6, pp.523-527
Advertised on:
12
2011
Citations
10
Refereed citations
10
Description
Biomarkers are molecules that are produced by or can be associated with
biological activities. They can be used as tracers that give us an idea
of the ancient biological communities that produced them, the
paleoenvironmental conditions where they lived, or the mechanism
involved in their transformation and preservation. As a consequence, the
preservation potential of molecules over time depends largely on their
nature, but also on the conditions of the environment, which controls
the decomposition kinetics. In this context, proteins and nucleic acids,
which are biomolecules bearing biological information, are among the
most labile molecules. In this research, we report the presence of
short-chained peptides obtained from extracts of ferruginous sedimentary
deposits that have been produced under the acidic and oxidizing
solutions of Río Tinto, Spain. These preliminary results go
against the paradigmatic idea that considers the acidic and oxidizing
environments inappropriate for the preservation of molecular
information.