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All of the bases in DNA and RNA have now been found in meteorites

The discovery adds to evidence that suggests life’s precursors came from space A 2-gram chunk from this rock — a piece of the meteorite that fell near Murchison, Australia, in 1969 — contains two crucial components of DNA and RNA now identified for the first time in an extraterrestrial source, researchers say. NASA More

“We’ve completed the set of all the bases found in DNA and RNA and life on Earth, and they’re present in meteorites,” says astrochemist Daniel Glavin of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. A few years ago, geochemist Yasuhiro Oba of Hokkaido University in Sapporo, Japan, and colleagues came up with a technique to gently extract and separate different chemical compounds in liquified meteorite dust and then analyze them. With this technique, Glavin, Oba and their colleagues measured the abundances of the bases and other compounds related to life in four samples from meteorites that fell decades ago in Australia, Kentucky and British Columbia.

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