Study shows ribose could be formed on ice in space

New Scientist : Ribose is the molecule at the backbone of RNA. But unlike many other building blocks of living cells, such as amino acids, ribose has never been found in samples from meteorites or created outside of cells in laboratories. Now Cornelia Meinert of the University of Nice Sophia Antipolis in France and her colleagues have created ribose in a lab by exposing frozen water, methanol, and ammonia—chemicals widely present in the early solar system—to UV light. A similar project by Scott Sandford of NASA’s Ames Research Center in California has also found success. Whether sugars such as ribose could actually form in space is still an open question, but the two teams have shown that a formation process is viable. It is possible that molecules of ribose have been preserved on distant, cold objects where they haven’t been broken apart by the Sun’s radiation; simpler sugars have already been found on comets. A cosmic recipe for ribose helps support the possibility that many of the building blocks of life emerged during the formation of the solar system.